In America, I’m Just Black: Black American Experiences with Privilege and Oppression in Paris

• In Event: 4147 - Global and Transnational Approaches to Culture and Power (Co-sponsored with the Section on Global and Transnational Sociology)

Abstract

Scholars have long explored the ways that racism, both structural and individual (“microaggressions), shape the everyday lives of Black Americans in the U.S. context. White Americans are widely understood as being the recipients of unearned advantages in social life, entitled “white privilege” or “white racism.” However, there is a gap in the literature regarding unearned advantages and social privileges accrued by Black Americans outside of the U.S. context. This study aims to highlight the phenomenon of Black American privilege. Located in Paris, France, this ethnographic study uses 50 in-depth interviews to examine how Black Americans experience an impermanent or “permeable” privilege in institutional and social dimensions of life. Respondents negotiate their privilege and regard it as tenuous – unlike current scholarship that frames privileged social groups as being unfamiliar with or in denial about their advantages, this group faces psycho-social difficulties with being simultaneously privileged and oppressed by their racial and ethnic identity. Rather than placing Black Americans firmly within a lens of privilege, this study is an attempt to locate them as constantly negotiating “insider” and “outsider” status. I borrow from Stephen Small’s theory of “Black vulnerability and visibility” in Europe to make a case for Black Americans facing similar circumstances as their Afro-descended counterparts. Finally, I use intersectionality to understand how it is an interlocking system of identities that confers and denies privileges.

Author

• Sonita Moss, University of Pennsylvania