African representatives seemed to have come to Kyiv earlier in June with a list of priorities that included their own stability, food security, imported goods, and the continuity of their regimes and countries, David Kirichenko writes.

Over breakfast yesterday, I read that physicists had discovered a sonic hum perhaps caused by enormous objects like black holes converging and rippling the space-time continuum. I grew up in my grandparents’ railroad apartment in South Brooklyn, and now live a life that stuns me with its privilege and creative freedom—I’m someone who thinks a lot about space and time, and how one traverses them. The idea of the ripples intrigued me: For a moment, I fantasized about my alternative futures. If I were born today, what might I become?

In the early morning, any future seemed possible. By lunch, after the Supreme Court had struck down affirmative action in college admissions, that was no longer true. The time of infinite possibility for a Latina from a low-income background like me was over. At least in this space called America.

When you’re an “other” at a predominantly white, elite institution, you share the knowledge that this place was not created for someone like you, no matter how welcome you might be now. Your presence relies on someone before you being the first—the first African American student, the first Latino, the first Asian American. This knowledge creates cross-cultural affinities—alliances and bonds among races and ethnicities that might not exist in any other setting. An understanding is born: We are all here, though our grandparents could not be. How can we be here for one another?

Almost immediately, texts began coming in from my college friends. One, a Latina who’d grown up in a New York City housing project and was the first in her family to attend college, proclaimed numbness, insisting she’d long ago lost faith in institutions, only to later admit that she was just pretending to feel that way as a form of self-protection. Another first-generation classmate, an Asian American woman from the Midwest, was distraught. “The entirety of what made you and me feel connected is like a separate universe now,” she said.

I went to Brown in the mid-’90s, when the minority-student population was so small that we had little choice but to stick together. At that time, I didn’t realize that I would spend my life navigating white power structures; I thought the challenges of life at Brown were just a temporary discomfort. A discomfort that I weathered with the help of my friends: Black, Latino, Afro-Latino, East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Native American. Our shared resources—deans, campus space for cultural clubs, access to public computers—were limited, but our support for one another was bountiful. During Black History Month, or Latino Heritage Month, or the annual Legends of the SEA (Southeast Asian) dance performance, we could count on our collective minority community to turn out. Every Friday was Unity Day at the minority-student center, and we danced and snacked and gossiped together.

The blow of the ruling, of the way it will deny access by denying the existence of racism, was made more painful by how it happened. The cases relied on the cynical recruitment of a handful of aggrieved Asian American plaintiffs who felt, alongside white plaintiffs, that less-qualified Black and Latino students were taking their spots. After this decision, The New York Times reported, “campuses of elite institutions would become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.” There it was, in black and white: We were all to be pitted against one another.

Young people of color aren’t just losing or gaining “spots”; they’re losing that multicultural community that once meant so much to me. Diversity will dwindle, but so too will the sense of shared grace that students of color extended to one another in these white spaces.

I did not deserve, on paper, to go to Brown. I had a perfect GPA in high school, but so did plenty of others who applied. I took what AP courses my public high school offered, which turned out, in the scheme of things, to be limited. I’d crushed my PSATs only to find myself crushed (twice) by the real thing. I was passionate about a handful of extracurriculars. Yet what I had and what they saw in me must have made me a good fit for their Open Curriculum: intense curiosity and the drive to act on it. I had not, like most of my classmates who’d gone through rigorous preparatory schools or well-funded suburban public ones, been “bred” to go to a school like Brown. But because of affirmative action, the admissions office looked past this imperfect pedigree, and saw me not for my limited experience in this elite arena, but for my possibility.

Like most things white society does for minorities, the concession came with a cost. It stung to have to endure—at the tender age of 17, when I was admitted (early, no less)—accusations from white students in my honors classes of having “used my ethnicity” to “take a spot.” In the beginning, it was hard to overcome this sense of needing to prove myself, to prove that I deserved my place there. But I chose to see it this way: Brown had taken a chance on me and I had taken a chance on Brown. For all parties, the gamble paid off.

I say I took a chance on Brown because there were easier paths. I could have gone full ride to any number of wonderful New York State or City schools, or even smaller private ones. I could have gone to a college where minority cultures were integral and not peripheral to campus life. Instead I went to Brown, a place that had taken 223 years to graduate a mere 100 Latinos. I took a chance and moved to Providence, and what I got in return was an expanded view of the world. An understanding of capital in all its forms. Entrée into spaces—whether or not people like to admit it—that only institutions like Ivies provide.

Above all, I gained from college a new sense of community and its importance. Yes, some of us were raised to go to places like Brown and others were not, but what we shared were curiosity, ambition—a desire to understand, and possibly better, the world. These are qualities that I still seek out in friends and colleagues.

But the gamble of affirmative action also benefited my alma mater—and all the predominantly white, elite institutions whose very DNA was changed by the practice. Though Clarence Thomas has clearly never gotten over what some see as the “stigma” of affirmative action, I certainly did. The same way that my worldview was expanded at Brown, the presence of minority students expanded the worldviews of our classmates.

We pretend we live in an equal and integrated society despite increased segregation over the past generation in our neighborhoods and our schools. A 2014 study found that three-quarters of white people didn’t have a single nonwhite friend. For many of my white classmates, college was their first chance to have meaningful relationships with a person from a different background. They participated—by force or by choice—in difficult conversations in dorm rooms about money or noise, and in classrooms about different assumptions. They were introduced to other cultures—salsa, banda, stepping, bhangra. In so many ways, the growing presence of people of color improved the “enrichment experience” for everyone around us.

Today, when I speak with minority students about imposter syndrome, I remind them that they are doing a service. They will likely be the only nonwhite friend most of their white college friends have for the rest of their life. I know that I am.

It may seem that this ruling affects only the most prestigious schools and the annoying overachievers who want to attend them. “Who cares?” you might ask. “If these kids have enough ganas, they can do just fine going to any school.” And to that I could reply: Eight out of the nine justices who just made this decision went to Ivies for undergraduate or law school (nine out of nine if we widen the category to “elite private schools”).

But even more important is the effect that diversity has on the research that elite institutions create. I have met many Latino academics, all probably products of affirmative action at some level, who simply did not exist in academia when I was in college. Their work on Latino health, voting patterns, emotional trauma, and other topics isn’t just good scholarship. It’s publicly accessible information that journalists like me can rely on to buttress a more expansive cultural conversation. Other minority researchers are studying unequal access to medical care, environmental racism, and the class disparities of health crises like long COVID. Affirmative action was designed to benefit minorities, but as America careens toward becoming a majority-minority nation, it has, in ways great and small, benefited us all.      

I am about to celebrate my 25th college reunion. Of its Ivy League peers, Brown is probably known as the most bohemian. But when it does tradition, it does it very well. Reunions

and commencement happen concurrently and involve a tradition called “the inverted sock.” The alumni cross our campus gates, oldest to youngest, lining the street all the way down to the church where the undergraduates have their ceremony. And when the graduates come out, the alumni all parade past them.

It is a way of paying tribute. Of creating a sense of lineage. But it is also like counting the rings of a very old tree. You can see when the school became co-ed—the women marching with Brown banners instead of Pembroke ones. And you can see the effects of affirmative action, as each reunion class that walks through those wrought-iron gates becomes more reflective not of white power, but of America. Immigrants, and the sons and daughters of immigrants, and descendants of slaves walking side by side—and having equal thoughts and potential and merit—with the descendants of slave owners.

I hate to think that, 25 years from now, watching that procession, our diversity and excellence will seem but a blip, and fade away in the ripples of time.

On the first day of class in the fall of 1924, Martha Lum walked into the Rosedale Consolidated School. The mission-style building had been built three years earlier for white students in Rosedale, Mississippi.

Martha was not a new student. This 9-year-old had attended the public school the previous year. But that was before Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, banning immigrants from Asia and inciting ever more anti-Asian racism inside the United States.

At the time, African Americans were fleeing the virulent racism of the Mississippi Delta in the Great Migration north and west. To replace them, white landowners were recruiting Chinese immigrants like Martha’s father, Gong Lum. But instead of picking cotton, many Chinese immigrants, like Gong and his wife, Katherine, opened up grocery stores, usually in Black neighborhoods, after being shut out of white neighborhoods.

At noon recess, Martha had a visitor. The school superintendent notified her that she had to leave the public school her family’s tax dollars supported, because “she was of Chinese descent, and not a member of the white or Caucasian race.” Martha was told she had to go to the district’s all-Black public school, which had older infrastructure and textbooks, comparatively overcrowded classrooms, and lower-paid teachers.

Gong Lum sued, appealing to the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. All nine justices ruled in favor of school segregation, citing the “separate but equal” doctrine from 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

[Imani Perry: Lessons from Black and Chinese relations in the Deep South]

“A child of Chinese blood, born in and a citizen of the United States, is not denied the equal protection of the law by being classed by the state among the colored races who are assigned to public schools separate from those provided for the whites when equal facilities for education are afforded to both classes,” the Court summarized in Gong Lum v. Rice on November 21, 1927.

A century from now, scholars of racism will look back at today’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action the way we now look back at Gong Lum v. Rice—as a judicial decision based in legal fantasy. Then, the fantasy was that separate facilities for education afforded to the races were equal and that actions to desegregate them were unnecessary, if not harmful. Today, the fantasy is that regular college-admissions metrics are race-neutral and that affirmative action is unnecessary, if not harmful.

The Supreme Court has effectively outlawed affirmative action using two court cases brought on by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Organized by a legal strategist named Edward Blum, SFFA filed suit on behalf of Asian American applicants to Harvard as well as white and Asian applicants to UNC to claim that their equal-protection rights were violated by affirmative action. Asian and white Americans are overrepresented in the student body at selective private and public colleges and universities that are well funded and have high graduation rates, but they are the victims?

This is indicative of a larger fantasy percolating throughout society: that white Americans, who, on average, stand at the more advantageous end of nearly every racial inequity, are the primary victims of racism. This fantasy is fueling the grievance campaigns of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Americans who oppose affirmative action have been misled into believing that the regular admissions metrics are fair for everyone—and that affirmative action is unfair for white and Asian American applicants.

It is a fantasy that race is considered as an admissions factor only through affirmative action. But the Court endorsed SFFA’s call for “race neutral” admissions in higher education—effectively prohibiting a minor admissions metric such as affirmative action, which closes racial inequities in college admissions, while effectively permitting the major admissions metrics that have long led to racial inequities in college admissions. Against all evidence to the contrary, the Court claimed: “Race-neutral policies may thus achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without … affirmative action policies.” The result of the Court’s decision: a normality of racial inequity. Again.

This is what the Court considers to be fair admissions for students, because the judges consider the major admissions metrics to be “race-neutral”—just as a century ago, the Court considered Mississippi public schools to be “separate but equal.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion, recognized “the inherent folly of that approach” but doesn’t recognize the inherent folly of his “race neutral” approach.

History repeats sometimes without rhyming. “Race neutral” is the new “separate but equal.”

The Court today claimed, “Twenty years have passed since Grutter, with no end to race- based college admissions in sight.” In actuality, twenty years have passed, with no end to racial inequity in sight.

Black, Latino, and Indigenous students continue to be underrepresented at the top 100 selective public universities. After affirmative action was outlawed at public universities in California and Michigan in the 1990s, Black enrollment at the most selective schools dropped roughly 50 percent, in some years approaching early-1970s numbers. This lack of diversity harms both students of color and white students.

In its reply brief in the UNC case, SFFA argued that the University of California system enrolls “more underrepresented minorities today than they did under racial preferences,”  referencing the increase of Latino students at UC campuses from 1997 to 2019. But accounting for the increase in Latino students graduating from high school, those gains should be even larger. There’s a 23-point difference between the percentage of high-school graduates in California who are Latino and the percentage of those enrolled in the UC system.

Declines in racial representation and associated harms extend to graduate and professional programs. The UC system produced more Black and Latino medical doctors than the national average in the two decades before affirmative action was banned, and dropped well below the national average in the two decades after.

[Bertrand Cooper: The failure of affirmative action]

Underrepresentation of Black, Latino, and Indigenous students at the most coveted universities isn’t a new phenomenon, it isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t because there is something deficient about those students or their parents or their cultures. Admissions metrics both historically and currently value qualities that say more about access to inherited resources and wealth— computers and counselors, coaches and tutors, college preparatory courses and test prep—than they do about students’ potential. And gaping racial inequities persist in access to each of those elements—as gaping as funding for those so-called equal schools in the segregated Mississippi Delta a century ago.

So what about class? Class-based or income-based interventions disproportionately help white students too, because their family’s low income is least likely to extend to their community and schools. Which is to say that low-income white Americans are far and away less likely than low-income Black and Latino Americans to live in densely impoverished neighborhoods and send their kids to poorly resourced public schools. Researchers find that 80 percent of low-income Black people and 75 percent of low-income Latino people reside in low-income communities, which tend to have lesser-resourced schools, compared with less than 50 percent of low-income white people. (Some Asian American ethnic groups are likely to be concentrated in low-income communities, while others are not; the data are not disaggregated to explore this.) Predominately white school districts, on average, receive $23 billion more than those serving the same number of students of color.

When admissions metrics value SAT, ACT, or other standardized-test scores, they predict not success in college or graduate school, but the wealth or income of the parents of the test takers. This affects applicants along racial lines, but in complex ways. Asian Americans, for example, have higher incomes than African Americans on average, but Asian Americans as a group have the highest income inequality of any racial group. So standardized tests advantage more affluent white Americans and Asian ethnic groups such as Chinese and Indian Americans while disadvantaging Black Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans, and poorer Asian ethnic groups such as Burmese and Hmong Americans. But standardized tests, like these other admissions metrics, are “race neutral”?

Standardized tests mostly favor students with access to score-boosting test prep. A multibillion-dollar test-prep and tutoring industry was built on this widespread understanding. Companies that openly sell their ability to boost students’ scores are concentrated in immigrant and Asian American communities. But some Asian American ethnic groups, having lower incomes, have less access to high-priced test-prep courses.

Besides all of this, the tests themselves have racist origins. Eugenicists introduced standardized tests a century ago in the United States to prove the genetic intellectual superiority of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon men. These “experimental” tests would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture,” the Stanford University psychologist and eugenicist Lewis Terman wrote in his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence. Another eugenicist, the Princeton University psychologist Carl C. Brigham, created the SAT test in 1926. SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” aptitude meaning “natural ability to do something.”

Why are advocates spending millions to expand access to test prep when a more effective and just move is to ban the use of standardized tests in admissions? Such a ban would help not only Black, Native, and Latino students but also low-income white and Asian American students.

Some selective colleges that went test-optional during the pandemic welcomed some of their most racially and economically diverse classes, after receiving more applications than normal from students of color. For many students of color, standardized tests have been a barrier to applying, even before being a barrier to acceptance. Then again, even where colleges and universities, especially post-pandemic, have gone test-optional, we can reasonably assume or suspect that students who submit their scores are viewed more favorably.

When admissions committees at selective institutions value students whose parents and grandparents attended that institution, this legacy metric ends up giving preferential treatment to white applicants. Almost 70 percent of all legacy applicants for the classes of 2014–19 at Harvard were white.

College athletes are mostly white and wealthy—because most collegiate sports require resources to play at a high level. White college athletes make up 70 to 85 percent of athletes in most non-revenue-generating sports (with the only revenue-generating sports usually being men’s basketball and football). And student athletes, even ones who are not gaming the system, receive immense advantages in the admissions process, thus giving white applicants yet another metric by which they are the most likely to receive preferential treatment. Even Harvard explained as part of its defense that athletes had an advantage in admissions over nonathletes, which conferred a much greater advantage to white students over Asian American students than any supposed disadvantage that affirmative action might create. And white students benefit from their relatives being more likely to have the wealth to make major donations to highly selective institutions. And white students benefit from their parents being overrepresented on the faculty and staff at colleges and universities. Relatives of donors and children of college employees normally receive an admissions boost.

Putting this all together, one study found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard were recruited athletes, legacy students, the children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (as relatives of donors)—compared with only 16 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian American students. About 75 percent of white admitted students “would have been rejected” if they hadn’t been in those four categories, the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found.

While private and public universities tout “diversity” recruitment efforts, their standard recruitment strategies concentrate on high-income students who are predominantly white and Asian, at highly resourced schools, positioned to have higher grade point averages and test scores that raise college rankings. Public colleges and universities facing declines in state and federal funding actively recruit white and wealthy out-of-state students who pay higher fees. At many institutions, including a UC campus, “admission by exception,” a practice originally promoted as a means of expanding opportunities for disadvantaged groups, has been used to enroll international students with the resources to pay U.S. tuition fees.

Targeting international students of color to achieve greater diversity on campus disadvantages American students of color. Targeting students from families who can pay exorbitant out-of-state fees benefits white families, who have, on average, 10 times the household net worth of Black families.

Affirmative action attempted to compensate not just for these metrics that give preferential treatment to white students, but also for the legacy of racism in society. This legacy is so deep and wide that affirmative action has rightly been criticized as a superficial, Band-Aid solution. Still, it has been the only admissions policy that pushes against the deep advantages that white Americans receive in the other admissions metrics under the cover of “race neutral.”

[Issa Kohler-Hausmann: No one knows what ‘race neutral’ admissions looks like]

If anti-affirmative-action litigants and judges were really supportive of “race neutrality”—if they were really against “racial preferences”—then they would be going after regular admissions practices. But they are not, because the regular admissions metrics benefit white and wealthy students.

Litigants and judges continue to use Asian Americans as political footballs to maintain these racial preferences for white and wealthy students. Particularly in the Harvard case, SFFA’s Edward Blum used Asian plaintiffs to argue that affirmative action harms Asian American applicants. No evidence of such racist discrimination was found in the lower courts. According to an amicus brief filed by 1,241 social scientists, the so-called race-neutral admissions policy SFFA advocated for (which was just adopted by the highest Court) would actually harm Asian American applicants. It denies Asian American students the ability to express their full self in their applications, including experiences with racism, which can contextualize their academic achievements or struggles and counter racist ideas. This is especially the case with Hmong and Cambodian Americans, who have rates of poverty similar to or higher than those of Black Americans. Pacific Islander Americans have a higher rate of poverty than the average American.

Pitting Asian and Black Americans against each other is an age-old tactic. Martha Lum’s parents didn’t want to send their daughter to a “colored” school, because they knew that more resources could be found in the segregated white schools. Jim Crow in the Mississippi Delta a century ago motivated the Lums to reinforce anti-Black racism—just as some wealthy Asian American families bought into Blum’s argument for “race neutral” admissions to protect their own status. Yet “separate but equal” closed the school door on the Lums. “Race neutral” is doing the same. Which is why 38 Asian American organizations jointly filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of affirmative action at Harvard and UNC.

A century ago, around the time the Court stated that equal facilities for education were being afforded to both races, Mississippi spent $57.95 per white student compared with $8.86 per Black student in its segregated schools. This racial inequity in funding existed in states across the South: Alabama ($47.28 and $13.32), Florida ($61.29 and $18.58), Georgia ($42.12 and $9.95), North Carolina ($50.26 and $22.34), and South Carolina ($68.76 and $11.27). “Separate but equal” was a legal fantasy, meant to uphold racist efforts to maintain these racial inequities and strike down anti-racist efforts to close them.

Homer Plessy had sued for being kicked off the “whites only” train car in New Orleans in 1892. About four years later, the Court deployed the “separate but equal” doctrine to work around the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause to defend the clearly unequal train cars and the exclusion of Black Americans like Plessy from better-equipped “whites only” cars. Later, the Court used the same doctrine to exclude Asian Americans like Martha Lum from better-equipped “whites only” schools.

The “separate but equal” doctrine was the Court’s stamp to defend the structure of racism. Just as Plessy v. Ferguson’s influence reached far beyond the railway industry more than a century ago, the fantasy of “race neutral” alternatives to affirmative action defends racism well beyond higher education. Evoking “race neutrality,” Justice Clarence Thomas recently dissented from the Supreme Court decision upholding a provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that prohibits racist gerrymandering.  

Now that “racial neutrality” is the doctrine of the land, as “separate but equal” was a century ago, we need a new legal movement to expose its fantastical nature. It was nearly a century ago that civil-rights activists in the NAACP and other organizations were gearing up for a legal movement to expose the fantasy of “separate but equal.” In this new legal movement, defenders of affirmative action can no longer use the false framing of affirmative action as “race conscious” and the regular admissions metrics as “race neutral”—a framing that has been used at least since the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978, which limited the use of affirmative action. Racist and anti-racist is a more accurate framing than “race neutral” and “race conscious.”  

[From the September 2021 issue: This is the end of affirmative action]

Affirmative-action policies are anti-racist because they have been proved to reduce racial inequities, while many of the regular admissions metrics are racist because they maintain racial inequities. To frame policies as “race neutral” or “not racist” or “race blind” because they don’t have racial language—or because the policy makers deny a racist intent—is akin to framing Jim Crow’s grandfather clauses and poll taxes and literacy tests as “race neutral” and “not racist,” even as these policies systematically disenfranchised southern Black voters. Then again, the Supreme Court allowed these Jim Crow policies for decades on the basis that they were, to use today’s term, “race neutral.” Then again, voter-suppression policies today that target Black, Latino, and Indigenous voters have been allowed by a Supreme Court that deems them “race neutral.” Jim Crow lives in the guise of “racial neutrality.”

Everyone should know that the regular admission metrics are the racial problem, not affirmative action. Everyone knew that racial separation in New Orleans and later Rosedale, Mississippi, was not merely separation; it was segregation. And segregation, by definition, cannot be equal. Segregationist policies are racist policies. Racial inequities proved that then.

The Court stated in today’s ruling, “By 1950, the inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment had thus begun to reemerge: Separate cannot be equal.” But it still does not want to acknowledge another inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment that has emerged today: Race cannot be neutral.

Today, racial inequities prove that policies proclaimed to be “race neutral” are hardly neutral. Race, by definition, has never been neutral. In a multiracial United States with widespread racial inequities in wealth, health, and higher education, policies are not “race neutral.” Policies either expand or close existing racial inequities in college admissions and employment. The “race neutral” doctrine is upholding racist efforts to maintain racial inequities and striking down anti-racist efforts to close racial inequities.

Race, by definition, has never been blind. Even Justice John Harlan, who proclaimed, “Our Constitution is color-blind” in his dissent of Plessy v. Ferguson, prefaced that with this declaration: “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country” and “it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.”

In the actual world, the “color-blind” often see their color as superior, as Harlan did. In the actual world, an equal-protection clause in a constitution can be transfigured by legal fantasy yet again to protect racial inequity.

“Separate but equal” then. “Race neutral” now.

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In the June 1940 issue of The Atlantic, the iconoclastic Black American author Richard Wright responded to a review of his recently published novel, Native Son, that had appeared in this magazine the month prior. Wright’s rebuttal, titled “I Bite the Hand That Feeds Me,” took his reviewer to task for a great many critical misreadings, most involving his characterization of the novel’s murderous protagonist, Bigger Thomas. But among the most arresting lines was an observation wholly removed from Chicago, where Native Son is set, and Mississippi, where both Wright and the critic, David L. Cohn, were born. After asserting that “the Negro problem in America is not beyond solution,” Wright dropped a parenthetical that portended a core tension in his future work: “I write from a country—Mexico—where people of all races and colors live in harmony and without racial prejudices or theories of racial superiority. Whites and Indians live and work and die here, always resisting the attempts of Anglo-Saxon tourists and industrialists to introduce racial hate and discrimination.”

Wright’s view of racism as a uniquely American inheritance would recur through much of his work—most intensely in “I Choose Exile,” an unpublished but later resurfaced 1951 essay in which Wright waxed poetic about France (“above all, a land of refuge”). Wright was by no means the first Black American creative figure to find artistic freedom and relative safety only after leaving the United States. Paris played host, and later home, to Josephine Baker and other Black American performers, as well as James Baldwin and William Gardner Smith. The city looms large in the Black intellectual history of the 20th century, and for many on this side of Y2K, the prospect of finding freedom overseas remains as alluring as ever.

Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad, a new book by the historian Tamara J. Walker, contextualizes the eternal conundrum of Wright’s work and politics by focusing on a different phase of his elective exile. Walker’s book constructs a lineage of Black Americans nurturing creative ingenuity through migration, making the case for freedom of movement as a companion to the freedom of expression. But it also elucidates the complex ways that anti-Black racism manifested both within the United States and in the countries where her subjects sought (and sometimes found) refuge. For example, Wright spent 1950 in Buenos Aires, then referred to as “the Paris of the Americas,” where the first film adaptation of Native Son was being shot. Unlike his travels in Paris or Mexico, his experience of Argentina was “one of the darkest times of his life,” Walker writes, and was rarely referenced in his own work. By situating his experience within a larger tradition of Black exodus, Walker paints a more nuanced portrait of the mordant literary figure—someone whose prescience, born partly of exile, still troubles the literary canon.

Of the loose cadre of Black expats living on either side of the Seine, Wright was certainly the most sanguine about his years in Europe. The author wrote about his time in Paris with breathless enthusiasm, maintaining until his death in 1960 that “there is more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America!” Both Baldwin and Gardner Smith, however, rejected Wright’s view of Paris as a racial utopia, even as they both found some measure of comfort and success there. Not long after Wright’s death, Baldwin published “Alas, Poor Richard,” a sorrowful account of their fractured friendship in which he criticized his erstwhile friend and mentor for idealizing a country that “would not have been a city of refuge for us if we had not been armed with American passports.”  

Walker, an associate professor of Africana studies at Barnard College of Columbia University, takes up this contradiction in her book: Each chapter of Beyond the Shores relays the story of one or two people (many of them artists of some kind—authors, singers, pianists, filmmakers) who traveled to one or two places during a specific decade. Their journeys take them to some expected vistas (Paris, London, post–World War II Germany) as well as to destinations with far less scholarship on Black American presence: Đà Nẵng, Kabondo, Kisumu, Yangiyul. In a chapter focusing on Ricki Stevenson, an American journalist turned tour guide in modern Paris, Walker underscores the enduring truth of Baldwin’s civil-rights-era critique. The multigenerational presence of Black people from African and West Indian nations once colonized by France began in the 17th century, when they were trafficked as human cargo. That many white Parisians would welcome an upwardly mobile American auteur in the early 20th century didn’t mean racial tolerance was inherently embedded in French society, as evidenced by the rising popularity of the far-right National Front—and its “calls for the eviction of non-white immigrants from France” and treatment of “French-born Arabs and Blacks as noncitizens”—in the 1980s.

Read: I tried to be a communist

Subjects are introduced in chronological order, with Walker making deft connections across chapters and narratives by mapping changes in policies, movements, and prevailing social attitudes in the United States, as well as in the other countries. The chapter about Richard Wright’s time in Argentina, for example, lays out how the threat of political and financial backlash from the United States kept other nations (including France) from hosting film adaptations of Native Son. The censorship followed Wright outside American borders: Spanish-language translations of the film were titled Sangre Negra, or “Black Blood,” rather than Hijo Nativo, which might have engendered more audience identification with its protagonist.

The first chapter points the reader toward the Washington, D.C.–born singer and actor Florence Mills, who made her Paris debut in 1926, when she was 30 years old. By then, Mills had been performing for two decades across the United States, earning rave reviews in productions such as the all-Black Broadway musical Shuffle Along. But Mills knew that Broadway success would not carry her to Hollywood, as it had for white actors. When the impresario of Blackbirds, the revue she’d been headlining, signed the cast up for a Paris run, Mills took a chance on moving to the city where she’d heard of more opportunities for Black singers, vaudeville acts, and cabaret performers.

Upon making her debut in France, Mills immediately drew comparisons to Josephine Baker, whose influence on modern cultural production is ubiquitous. But in recounting Mills’s years in Europe, Walker expands upon that narrow resemblance. Part of what makes Beyond the Shores so satisfying is Walker’s vivid depictions of the environments that her subjects entered when they immigrated. Their stories are rendered not solely through what they produced, but also through what they saw, what they ate, what they must have felt. Walker describes the pillars of diasporic nightlife that earned parts of 1920s Paris the nickname “French Harlem,” where “patrons could dance to Martinican biguines, which derived from the folk songs of the enslaved, Senegalese orchestra tunes that included elements of Cuban music that traveled to African airways and migrated to France, and even some African American jazz.”

View of American author Richard Wright as he walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, France, 1959 (Gisele Freund/Photo Researchers History/Getty)

In such a setting, Mills and her fellow performers could move through everyday life—and toward bigger stages—without being hobbled by the crushing weight of Jim Crow. The Black press in America took note: One headline from the New York Amsterdam News read, “Colored Artists Holding Sway and Being Treated Like Human Beings by the French.” Walker takes care to complicate such assessments, enumerating the organizations in France that were fighting anti-Blackness on their home turf even as American performers garnered acclaim. And of course, Mills’s time in Paris was not without moments of overt discrimination, especially when a local economic downturn led to an influx of white American patrons at bars and cafés. Walker approaches these points of difficulty with empathetic rigor, as she does with moments of discomfort between Black Americans and other Black people they encountered in their travels. The American passport functions, in some instances, as a totem of whiteness: “In Nigeria, locals alternately called African American Peace Corps volunteers ‘white black’ and ‘native foreigners,’” Walker writes, “while Cameroonians referred to one volunteer as a ‘Black white woman.’”

With each story, Beyond the Shores builds a canon of Black creative expression that crosses both temporal and geographic barriers. “Bringing Florence back into the mainstream spotlight does more than simply renew attention to her remarkable life and career,” Walker writes. “It’s an opportunity to remember that Baker was just one of countless African American performers who made their way to the City of Light, left indelible marks on its cultural landscape, and turned it into a destination for new forms of music, dancing, and cross-cultural mingling that would be felt for decades to come.” Walker threads Beyond the Shores together with excavations of her own family’s journeys too: In the book’s prologue, she explains how hearing about her grandfather’s service abroad in World War II prompted some of her earliest childhood questions about Black migration. As others’ stories unfold, so does her own, giving the book the feel of a travel memoir without ever losing the gravity of a historical compendium. The interplay deepens the book’s storytelling; by observing the past through the lives of others, she seems to suggest, we can imagine an alternate vision of our own future.

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