Another brilliant black American, Ta-Nehisi Coates, followed his idol – the great James Baldwin – in romanticising Paris in his book Between the World and Me, which no doubt surprised black and brown Parisians no end. The Paris of the 1960s was no racial paradise, with the 1961 massacre of some forty-plus Parisian-Algerians during Algeria’s war for independence and the clear segregation of that era. Nor is the Paris of today anything close to a racial utopia. It’s strange that anyone could visit Paris and fail to notice the visible racial segregation of the African and Caribbean ‘French’
...more
