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,…
