Today, France commemorates the life and legacy of Josephine Baker by giving her the highest honor: a place in the Panthéon among France’s most distinguished citizens. Baker will be only the sixth woman, the third Black person, and the first Black woman to be laid to rest there.
As a champion of Civil Rights in the United States and a key agent of the Résistance in France, she embodied the best of these two nations.
Of course, much like James Baldwin, Baker also understood that she and fellow Black American artists were celebrated and given opportunities because they were, first and foremost, American. The same considerations weren’t, and often still aren’t, offered to French citizens of color who continue to face discrimination in their daily lives.
“In the white French gaze, Black American artists in particular were from—but not entirely of—the United States: central to a version of its culture but absolved from the consequences of its power. They inhabited a liminal racial and political space in which their racial difference was embraced because the French found themselves neither familiar with nor implicated in the conditions that made their exile necessary. Theirs was an honorary, if contingent, racial status. They were free, for example, to write about racial atrocities in America—but not to comment on colonial atrocities committed by France, either at home or abroad.”
Gary Younge
We should take this opportunity to dig a bit deeper. Beyond the fact that Baker absolutely deserves this honour, it’s worth considering why France has not extended the same to other vital figures, activists, and champions of liberty. As Rokhaya Diallo writes in her Washington Post op-ed, “Baker made France look good. Though her heroism is incontestable, she always expressed gratitude to France and never criticized its colonialism. It is therefore telling that Macron did not take up a proposal to pantheonize lawyer Gisèle Halimi, who was involved in anti-colonial activism in support of the Algerian people during their war against France.”
The decision to commemorate Josephine Baker cannot bury the realities of daily life for so many French people, nor should it suggest that the country is the colorblind democracy it perceives itself to be. As Diallo puts it, “it will take more than Baker’s elevation to show the republic has changed.”
Further reading
For more reading on this topic, I highly recommend Diallo’s piece and this brilliant and in-depth analysis in The Nation by journalist Gary Younge. To follow other women (in addition to Rokhaya Diallo) who are shaping the discussion in Paris and are featured in my book The New Parisienne, click here.
