American ideas about racism are influencing Europe

FROM THE 1940s-60s, philosophical ideas about racism tended to flow westward across the Atlantic. Writers of the Francophone négritude school such as Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire foreshadowed America’s “black is beautiful” movement, as did Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “Black Orpheus”. Frantz Fanon’s polemics against French colonialism influenced American debates on violence in the civil-rights movement. African-American writers and musicians like Richard Wright, Miles Davis and Nina Simone went to Europe to escape America’s colour bar. Analyses of Nazi racism by the philosophers of Germany’s Frankfurt School crossed the Atlantic with Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse’s student Angela Davis earned her doctorate in Berlin; after she joined the Black Panthers, ending up on the run from the FBI, James Baldwin wrote in support of her from his home in France. Segregationists made the most of all this, disparaging the civil-rights movement as a conspiracy of European socialist eggheads.

This summer, as the Black Lives Matter movement spread internationally, some Europeans felt that the tide had turned: the latest American ideas about racism were now flowing into Europe. Academics—especially those who have studied in America—have embraced concepts like institutional racism and white privilege, eagerly translated by local news media (“weisse Privilegien”, “le privilège blanc”). Activist journalists like Rokhaya Diallo in France, Alice Hasters in Germany and Clarice Gargard in the Netherlands are elated that anti-black racism is being taken so seriously. So are many Europeans, black and otherwise.