How can a country that hails Josephine Baker take the racist Zemmour seriously? | Kenan Malik
How does it feel to be a white man?" Simeon was not a white man. He was an African American who had left his homeland to escape the ferocious racism every African American faced and sought shelter in Paris. There, he had got into a fight in a bar with an Algerian. The police threw the Algerian into jail. Simeon they let go. In Paris, it was the light-skinned Algerian who was treated like blacks back home, the dark-skinned American to whom the authorities show deference. How does it feel to be a white man?" taunted the Algerian.
Simeon is the central character in William Gardner Smith's newly republished 1963 novel The Stone Face. Smith, like Simeon, like many black Americans in the middle decades of the last century, found in France a refuge from the segregation and bigotry that scarred America. There is more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America!" claimed the novelist Richard Wright in his essay I Choose Exile.
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