A groundbreaking study about everyday antiblackness and its refusal in an officially raceblind France. What does it mean to be racialized-as-black in France on a daily basis? #You Know You’re Black in France When… responds to that question. Under the banner of universalism, France messages a powerful and seductive ideology of blindness to race that disappears blackened people and the antiblackness they experience. As Tricia Keaton notes, in everyday life, France is anything but raceblind. In this interdisciplinary study, drawn from a range of critical scholarship including that of Philomena Essed and Frantz Fanon, Keaton illuminates how b/Black (racialized/politicized) French people distinctly expose and refuse what she calls “raceblind republicanism.” By officially turning a blind eye to the specificity of antiblackness, the French state in fact perpetuates it, she argues, along with structural racism. Through daily life, public policies, visual culture, the private lives of individuals and families shattered by police violence, the French courts where many are fighting back, and her own experiences, Keaton charts the troubling dynamics and continuities of antiblackness in French society.

"How daily antiblackness in mainland France, rooted in enslavement and coloniality, legitimizes antiblack dehumanization in spite of the "official" state position of raceblindness, echoing structural racism conversations worldwide"--

In Black France / France Noire, scholars, activists, and novelists address the paradox of race in France: the state does not acknowledge race as a meaningful category, but experiences of antiblack racism belie claims of color-blindness.

A meditation on race and identity from one of our most provocative cultural critics. A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family’s multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a “black” father from the segregated South and a “white” mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of “black blood” makes a person black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he’d never rigorously reflected on its foundations—but the shock of his experience as the black father of two extremely white-looking children led him to question these long-held convictions. It is not that he has come to believe that he is no longer black or that his kids are white, Williams notes. It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of them—or anyone else, for that matter. Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time.

"[Keaton] provides the most in-depth analysis of the predicament of French Arabs and Africans living in the suburbs of Paris.... [O]ne can read the book through the lens of such great African American writers and activists as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X.... [It] contains an implicit warning to you, France, not to repeat the American racism in your country." -- from the foreword by Manthia Diawara Muslim girls growing up in the outer-cities of Paris are portrayed many ways in popular discourse -- as oppressed, submissive, foreign, "kids from the projects," even as veil-wearing menaces to France's national identity -- but rarely are they perceived simply as what they say they are: French. Amid widespread perceptions of heightened urban violence attributed to Muslims and highly publicized struggles over whether Muslim students should be allowed to wear headscarves to school, Muslim girls often appear to be the quintessential "other." In this vivid, evocative study, Trica Danielle Keaton draws on ethnographic research in schools, housing projects, and other settings among Muslim teenagers of North and West African origin. She finds contradictions between the ideal of universalism and the lived reality of ethnic distinction and racialized discrimination. The author's own experiences as an African American woman and non-Muslim are key parts of her analysis. Keaton makes a powerful statement about identity, race, and educational politics in contemporary France.

Winner of the Jhalak Prize 'A revelation' Owen Jones 'Afropean seizes the blur of contradictions that have obscured Europe's relationship with blackness and paints it into something new, confident and lyrical' Afua Hirsch A Guardian, New Statesman and BBC History Magazine Best Book of 2019 'Afropean. Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity ... A continent of Algerian flea markets, Surinamese shamanism, German Reggae and Moorish castles. Yes, all this was part of Europe too ... With my brown skin and my British passport - still a ticket into mainland Europe at the time of writing - I set out in search of the Afropeans, on a cold October morning.' Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identities. Here is an alternative map of the continent, taking the reader to places like Cova Da Moura, the Cape Verdean shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon with its own underground economy, and Rinkeby, the area of Stockholm that is eighty per cent Muslim. Johny Pitts visits the former Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where West African students are still making the most of Cold War ties with the USSR, and Clichy Sous Bois in Paris, which gave birth to the 2005 riots, all the while presenting Afropeans as lead actors in their own story.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.