Bienvenue, Welcome
First and foremost, I dedicate this site to both my mother and father to whom I owe so much for instilling in me the values and principles of faith, hard work, and humility. For this, to them I will forever be grateful. I love you both more than words can express. I would be remiss, to have the privilege as a black male growing up in the United States, Atlanta to be exact to have the opportunity to teach and study at the graduate level in another country, if I did not tell my story.
An eventual memoir of sorts, the backdrop of these posts will be personal anecdotes and lessons learned in reference to travel, culture, and identity. I also am looking to compare my personal experience as an African American back home to the experience as a black person here in Paris. With that said, my aim is at best, to promote travel. Second, I hope to bring awareness to the questions it raises and to the advantages it provides. And lastly, I am seeking to add another untold dimension to the travel narrative -- specifically through the lens of a black male. It is my hope that these observations will help to dismantle some of the common beliefs and attitudes in western culture about both places and the people living in them. These anecdotes entail my own experience and thoughts, and so, the point is not to reduce the narrative down to one broad stroke. I seek to tell an untold story which may differ from the familiar travel experiences in Europe reminisced and romanticized back home state side. I hope that this platform can provide an alternate perspective.
In the reality series, Black-ish, Anthony Anderson performs an interview with the television network ABC and stated that as African Americans, "we rarely get to tell our stories". This platform is one of the most useful tools that I have to be able to tell stories that have in the past either been etched out in the past and forgotten or simply never told. What I hope to do more broadly speaking, is to bridge the gap between two cultures, American and French, whose perceptions of each other to this day tend take on a rather hyperbolic tone.
In the foreground of the un-captioned photo above is Richard Wright’s Black Boy published in 1945. It is of a particular symbolic importance and value, as it was the first book I read during the start of my graduate studies in France. In the background behind the book is a newspaper headlining Colin Kaepernick and his kneeling during the U.S. national anthem. This kneel was also of symbolic importance, albeit, in the wider context of U.S. racial politics. It was given to me by my roommate, as she liked to refer to herself, rather than as a host mom, Madame Balloy with whom I lived during my first year of graduate school in the westerly Parisian suburb of Mantes-la-Jolie. She would read the newspaper every Sunday morning and so when she found out about my interest in questions of race, she could not help but recommend I read it. This was a recurring trend of hers as she would often save articles that she felt I would find interesting. She also had a relatively vast library where I eventually would discover that she had Richard Wright's book, which, ironically she had never picked up to read herself. And so, this blog was born, to provide a bit of context, around that same time, being that of the kneel. It was birthed in a moment of my discovery, in many ways from living with Mme Balloy, that race, compared to the place and country I called home, carried a different weight of symbolic value, if any at all.
An eventual memoir of sorts, the backdrop of these posts will be personal anecdotes and lessons learned in reference to travel, culture, and identity. I also am looking to compare my personal experience as an African American back home to the experience as a black person here in Paris. With that said, my aim is at best, to promote travel. Second, I hope to bring awareness to the questions it raises and to the advantages it provides. And lastly, I am seeking to add another untold dimension to the travel narrative -- specifically through the lens of a black male. It is my hope that these observations will help to dismantle some of the common beliefs and attitudes in western culture about both places and the people living in them. These anecdotes entail my own experience and thoughts, and so, the point is not to reduce the narrative down to one broad stroke. I seek to tell an untold story which may differ from the familiar travel experiences in Europe reminisced and romanticized back home state side. I hope that this platform can provide an alternate perspective.
In the reality series, Black-ish, Anthony Anderson performs an interview with the television network ABC and stated that as African Americans, "we rarely get to tell our stories". This platform is one of the most useful tools that I have to be able to tell stories that have in the past either been etched out in the past and forgotten or simply never told. What I hope to do more broadly speaking, is to bridge the gap between two cultures, American and French, whose perceptions of each other to this day tend take on a rather hyperbolic tone.
In the foreground of the un-captioned photo above is Richard Wright’s Black Boy published in 1945. It is of a particular symbolic importance and value, as it was the first book I read during the start of my graduate studies in France. In the background behind the book is a newspaper headlining Colin Kaepernick and his kneeling during the U.S. national anthem. This kneel was also of symbolic importance, albeit, in the wider context of U.S. racial politics. It was given to me by my roommate, as she liked to refer to herself, rather than as a host mom, Madame Balloy with whom I lived during my first year of graduate school in the westerly Parisian suburb of Mantes-la-Jolie. She would read the newspaper every Sunday morning and so when she found out about my interest in questions of race, she could not help but recommend I read it. This was a recurring trend of hers as she would often save articles that she felt I would find interesting. She also had a relatively vast library where I eventually would discover that she had Richard Wright's book, which, ironically she had never picked up to read herself. And so, this blog was born, to provide a bit of context, around that same time, being that of the kneel. It was birthed in a moment of my discovery, in many ways from living with Mme Balloy, that race, compared to the place and country I called home, carried a different weight of symbolic value, if any at all.