Blacks leaving America in search of equality is not new. The practice dates from at least antebellum Louisiana, when free mulattoes in New Orleans sent their children to France to live in accordance with their means and not their color. It continued after World War II, when a number of black G.I.s, artists and jazzmen shared Richard Wright’s sentiment that there is “more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America.”
Today, that might sound hyperbolic — enormous gains have been made in America at every social level, and many blacks live as well as one can reasonably hope to anywhere. Yet we are consistently reminded of how tenuous this progress can be; how possible it still is to be humiliated on the front porch or cut down in Walmart by an officer who will never be held to account.
Watching what happened in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island and knowing that blacks are 21 times more likely than whites to be shot by the police constitute a heavy psychological tax. Freedom — and more broadly speaking, basic well-being — are relative goods. I lament that Paris can be a threatening space for Jews, Roma, Africans and Arabs, but the truth is, as a black American, I’ve never felt safer or less harassed anywhere. It’s difficult to exaggerate the existential boon of shedding one’s victimhood.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member