Bianca Colón
The French women of color who wrote “Noire n’est pas mon métier” (Black is not my job) reminded me of Nella Larsen’s semi-autobiographical character Helga Crane, but there were also important and interesting differences between them. One of the common themes was the exoticization and objectification of blackness that Helga Crane felt in Denmark and that Rachel Khan (one of the “Black is not my job” authors) felt in France.
Rachel Khan won a national championship in France as a sprinter. Almost her entire team was some shade of black and her coach (a white man) told his darkest athlete, “You are the most black. You are the blackest, so you run the fastest.” This special attention because of her blackness might seem empowering, but that is not how Rachel Khan experienced it. In her words: “I was hearing this thing – that this word ‘black’ was fused with something very fantastical, something from a fantasy world. A beautiful Black woman – it all went together,” and “It’s almost as though you become a black object, and you’re no longer a person.” (Warner)
Helga Crane had a similar experience in Denmark. Her new aunt in Chicago had earlier responded to her brown skin with “frightened anger” (Larsen, 61), so, at first, she welcomed the attention and admiration she received in Copenhagen for what the Danes called “lovely brown skin” (Larsen, 64) and her new uncle’s statement that “She’s beautiful; beautiful!” (Larsen, 65) pleased her. But she soon felt like “some new and strange species of pet dog being proudly exhibited” (Larsen, 66) by her aunt and uncle, even though she enjoyed being desired. When a famous Danish artist asks her to marry him, she rejects him, because he cannot see her as a real person. Instead, the Danish artist, and all the rest of Danish society, see her as an exotic creature from a fantasy world.
Another thing Helga Crane and the authors of “Black is not my job” have in common is the challenge of reconciling conflicting identities. The authors of “Black is not my job” face the problem of being both African and French, when French-ness is still understood as meaning that all your ancestors for centuries were born in France—and not just white, but also having French names and being Catholic. Helga faces an even tougher task. She is biracial in a world that does not recognize the possibility of being two different things at the same time. When she lives among black people, she feels out of place because she seems to be denying her inherent whiteness on her Danish mother’s side. When she lives among white people, she feels out of place because she is treated as an outsider. Her white American relatives treat her as someone less than the rest of their family and friends. Her white Danish relatives treat her as an interesting exotic, but still not a full, or normal person. Helga winds up living as if only her black identity is real, even though she is constantly inwardly reminded of the inadequacy of that identity and the reality of the white and Danish identity she feels forced to deny. But even in Denmark, where her blackness is the most obvious to everyone, she is reminded that she is not fully black by an ignorant peasant lady who says Helga is not black enough to be a Negro.
The authors of “Black is not my job” could go back to Africa, as Helga went back to Denmark. (Perhaps some of their siblings and other people in their situation do go back to Africa.) But the authors of “Black is not my job” have no desire to flee the places where they are. Instead, they are trying to change France into a place where they feel more at home. Helga handles the problem differently. For Helga, the struggle to find a home involves running away. She flees Naxos for Chicago, Chicago for New York, New York for Copenhagen, from Copenhagen back to New York, etc., but she never finds a sense of being at home.
Changing America (or Denmark) was not a very realistic option for one unknown individual, like Helga Crane, but there are sixteen authors of “Black is not my job” and they are all prominent actresses, and they have already gotten the people who control the French dictionary to change certain words. They seem very optimistic that they can make France better and more inclusive. Helga Crane was not optimistic about changing America. In fact, she is so convinced that the U.S. is unfixable that when her newborn baby dies she feels relief instead of sorrow because now there would be one less oppressed black person in the world.
It is interesting that the attitude of the “Black is not my job” authors toward France is so different from Jamaica Kincaid’s attitude toward England. Kinkaid says: “I wished that every sentence, everything I knew, that began with England would end with ‘and then it all died, we don’t know how, it just all died.’” (Kincaid, 40) The authors of “Black is not my job” do not want everything about France to die; they just want the idea of Frenchness to expand to include them as full people in France and not just exoticized oddities from some fantasy world. Helga Crane finds temporary relief in religion, but when she stops believing in God she despairs because she cannot find a place for herself in this world: she cannot change this world, and there is no other world yet to come.
Probably the biggest difference between Helga Crane’s experience in 1920s America and the experiences of the “Black is not my job” authors in present-day France is the difference between U.S. segregation laws and the French idea that people should not be “communitariste.” In America in the 1920s there were laws restricting how different races interacted, including where people could sit and who could eat where. The idea was that blacks and whites could interact in professional ways for business purposes, but that they should not interact socially outside a business situation. Many black people agreed with the idea of social segregation. For example, Helga Crane’s black friend, Anne Grey, wants to ostracize another black woman, Audrey Denney, because she goes to parties with white people. Of course, interracial marriage and miscegenation are the ultimate form of social desegregation, and Helga Crane is biracial, so just by existing she forces people to question whether social segregation is a good idea. Either Helga is a good idea, or segregation is a good idea; inf fact, if segregation is a good idea, Helga has not right to exist.
What Anne Grey wants to encourage is black people sticking together and socializing only with each other. The French have a word for racial minorities sticking together; they call it being “communitariste,” and they do not like it. The French remember the Nazis in World War Two, and they think that recognizing race as an important category would put them on the path to repeating Nazis crimes and wars. They are afraid that voluntary racial segregation like Anne Grey advocates will make race a way of dividing French people from each other and violate the idea that France, and the French, are indivisible. This makes it tough for people like Rachel Khan and the other authors of “Black is not my job,” because they are having different experiences due to their race, like the white coach who said “you are the blackest, so you are the fastest,” but they are not supposed to socialize too much with other racial minorities who have similar experiences.
The hosts of the podcast about the “Black is not my job” authors end the show by pointing out that most black French people they talked to on the show were the children of immigrants. Their parents came from Africa and were just trying to get by, but their children are trying to do better than that, and they contrast this with the U.S. situation where blacks have been present for centuries and we have a very long, and mostly bad history of dealing with race. According to the hosts, the French are trying to figure race out without the long history the U.S. has. This is not quite right. In the U.S. we have a very specific history of dealing with race in terms of blacks and whites, and this is new for the French. But the French have an important history of dealing with race in Nazi terms where Jews, Germans, and French were different races even though in the U.S. they would all be racially white. The French are trying to figure out how to understand black racial difference through the lens of their history with the Nazis. Maybe we in the U.S. are having some of those same challenges trying to figure out Latinx racial identity through the overly simple and binary lens of our history with black and white races. When you think about it, maybe America and France are not so different or exceptional after all.
Works Cited
Kinkaid, Jamaica. Transition Number 51. “On seeing England”
Larsen, Nella, Deborah E. McDowell, and Nella Larsen. Quicksand: And, Passing. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Print.
Warner, Gregory. Rough Translation Podcast, “We (Still) Don’t Say That” Season 4, Episode 7 December 16, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/12/16/947221309/we-still-dont-say-that
About the Author
Bianca Colón was a student in Comp Lit 391: The Unexceptional US: Global Readings in US Culture, taught by Jim Hicks in Fall 2021.
