BNA, Franco-Congolese artist in New York – credit: BNA official @bna__official

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Want to extend the conversation? We meet this Thursday, June 4 in our free-to-air program La Bande FM with our guest journalist and entrepreneur Claude Grunitzky to talk about the death of George Floyd and racism in the US. Registration here

When the unbearable video of the death of George Floyd surfaced on social networks, Tuesday, May 26, the author of children’s books Alice Endamne, French born of Gabonese parents and married to an African-American, said to himself: “it starts again“. Settled in California for 22 years, where she came to do research on racial and gender discrimination, she has long experienced racism “institutionalized” that is rampant in the United States, particularly in the police force. The death of George Floyd? “It will repeat itself until mentalities change, she says. My husband is a nuclear physics scientist. When he walks to the store, I’m always afraid for him!“.

The Obama Promise

She is not the only one to have this feeling among French and black French speakers in the United States. At her house, north of Atlanta, Chrystelle Kimoto had a conversation with her 12½ year old daughter after the publication of the video showing the white police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck. “She asked me: mom, can this happen to us? I replied yes, unfortunately“. Arriving nine years ago, Chrystelle Kimoto was won over by the promise of President Obama. Smothered by ordinary racism in France, she moved with her husband and children to the United States after winning the green card lottery.

In 2012, racism caught up with her. Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black boy, is shot dead by a volunteer vigil in Florida with no legal consequences. One morning her son came back from jogging with a “hoodie ” evoking the appearance of Trayvon Martin the day of his death. “I told him he couldn’t do this. These deaths are so recurrent. It’s complicated for parents. We kill the innocence and carelessness of children“, she says. Her boy will reach the legal age to drive (16) at the end of October, but she is afraid of seeing him take the wheel and risking being arrested by the police.

“I have experienced racism, but it will never be the same as the one they experience”

As a black Frenchwoman in the United States, Chrystelle Kimoto sometimes feels caught in the midst of dynamics that are difficult to reconcile. In the eyes of the Whites, numerous in the French community and in its neighborhood, it is black. But that does not mean that she identifies with the challenges of the African-American community. Immigrant, she says she sees the United States as a land of opportunity, where African-Americans still suffer from many socio-economic ills inherited from slavery, despite the progress of the 1960s. “Relations with black Americans can sometimes be complex because, descendants of slaves, some have the impression that blacks from Europe or Africa do not live the same thing as them and do not understand. I am black, French and I have experienced racism, but it will never be the same as the one they live, she explains. For my part, I have the privilege of arousing curiosity. Admittedly, I am black but when I open my mouth, you hear my French accent and I am asked where I come from while a black American person suffers more prejudices ”.

When we talk to him on the phone, Sunday evening, Claude Grunitzky puts the finishing touches to an article, intended for the site he created, True Africa. It is an article on the indignation and the national crisis which seized the country since the death of George Floyd. But it is above all an article on his personal experience, that of a black man who lives in the United States but was not born there and did not grow up there. Born in Togo, having grown up in France where he studied at Sciences Po, the journalist-entrepreneur arrived in the United States 22 years ago and enjoyed success there, creating the magazine Trace then the eponymous media group, sold since.

“When I left France for London and then New York, it was mainly because I was leaving a country where I had never seen a black man reach the summit when in the United States there were Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, and especially the whole hip-hop movement ”. This idea of ​​America as a land of opportunity has not gone away, he says: “I clearly took advantage of these opportunities”, but she cohabits with “An institutionalized racism which is not of the same nature as that which one can know in France”.

“I remember, he says, a dinner in Paris with Opal Tometi, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement a few years ago. It was a very complicated discussion: basically, she explained to me that I could not fully understand the African-American experience because I had not experienced oppression growing up here ”. Offended at the time for being thus excluded from the African-American experience, he says that he is rethinking these conversation these days and saying to himself “She was right: I will never know what it means to grow up black in the United States”. If he has “of course” known incidents “clearly motivated by racism ”, he was, he thinks, much less a victim of ordinary racism than his American friends. “When I arrived, I was identified as French before being seen as black, my personal cross-cultural and cosmopolitan history clearly gave me more opportunities than people born here and prisoners of the system”.

Trump and hope gone

In 2008, Claude Grunitzky experienced the election of Barack Obama as the advent of a new era. The hope is such that the event convinces him to take American nationality. “And there really was a state of grace, which I benefited from myself. But economic injustice is greater than ever and it is what is fueling today’s anger ”. Above all, he says, the difference is that Donald Trump replaced Barack Obama in the White House. In 2014, during the Ferguson demonstrations, after the death of Michael Brown, a black teenager killed by a white police officer, there was a desire for dialogue at the top of the state. “Today, with Trump and his speech from the start, says Claude Grunitzky, there is no desire to compromise, on the contrary. This explains why the riots spread very quickly all over the country, whereas in 2014 they were limited to a few cities ”. The fruit, says the journalist, of the provocations of Donald Trump, but also of “the injustice of the social contract, which we have in the Covid-19 crisis, even in statistics like in New Orleans: 30% of the population is black, but blacks represent 70% of the dead! ”

BNA, a musician and model from Brooklyn, arrived in New York last year. Victim of racism in France, the Franco-Congolese had disputes with a white police officer in the United States. But she also feels a divide with what African-Americans live around her. “As a black Frenchwoman, I was hostile to the way they responded to attacks. Then, when I understood their story, I was able to measure the trauma linked to the legacy of slavery, prison, family problems, she lists. They experienced things that we did not experience. As French, we have privileges ”.

Even if she suffered police racism in New York, BNA considers herself happier in the United States than in France, where she felt “belittled ”. Drawing on his multicultural journey, the artist has just released a single, Konnichiwa, on tolerance and is working on a song, “Congo”, on political instability in the African country, his other homeland. “Racists in the United States will openly say they are. In France, it’s more hypocritical ”.

Alexis Buisson and Emmanuel Saint-Martin

Find out more

Want to extend the conversation? We meet this Thursday, June 4 in our free-to-air program La Bande FM with our guest journalist and entrepreneur Claude Grunitzky to talk about the death of George Floyd and racism in the US. Registration here

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