In connection with the third annual
Festival Albertine,
a free New York celebration of French and American culture, the New York Times reporter
Jennifer Schuessler met with the curator of the event running
Wednesday through Nov. 6 and organized by the Cultural
Services of the French Embassy and the Albertine bookshop in Manhattan. He is Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of
“Between the World and Me”.
“Between
the World and Me” came out in French while you were there. How was the
reception there different from its reception in the United States?
I
didn’t want to hustle anybody and pose as this big-time intellectual,
which is something I’m uncomfortable with, even here. But the book
became an organizing place for talking about their own issues, and I was
happy to allow for that. Americans are always saying, “We need to have a
national conversation about race!” But we have no idea — France doesn’t
even acknowledge race.
… You’re
moderating the opening panel, “When Will France Have Its Barack
Obama?,” which features Jelani Cobb from The New Yorker, along with
three French scholars, including Pap Ndiaye, the author of “La Condition Noire” and a founder of black studies in France. What’s your answer to that question?
I’m going to let the folks on the panel talk. But I’d say that Barack
Obama, to an extent that is not fully understood, is really a product of
black institutions. It’s not like he ran from Hawaii. He went to the
South Side of Chicago, which has a long, long political tradition. There
was a community to root himself in. How does that happen in France?
There you had the lack of a trenchant Jim Crow system, the lack of
slavery on the mainland. The things that made racism so severe here
actually gave black institutions much of their vigor. And there is a
strong sense of community held together by those institutions. I could
be dead wrong about this, but it would be tough to look for a Harlem in
Paris. There are black neighborhoods, don’t get me wrong. But that’s not
all Harlem is.
You’ve been back for a few months. How did your year in Paris change your view of America?
We
get into this very simplistic analysis of which country is more racist.
But it’s more productive to look at the history of a country. Racism
certainly exists in France, but it’s not the same. Is it better? I don’t
know. But I like it here. It feels like home.
