Andre G. Gray: tha Giant [Blog]

Sat night around four or five in the morning, in the midst of the delirium that one might find themselves in that time of the week, i stumbled into a cab. To start, it took me a good half hour to get a cab, which i found to be pretty telling since i was not only on a crowded street but many cabbies had passed by. From my limited cab taking experience in SF, I have come to think that it should not take that long to get a cab as long as your in a highly trafficked area, even if your on the darker side of the color spectrum. So, i get in the cab and a man of north african descent asks me where i was going. Place de Clichy. the house. Normally i would expect some sort of political conversation to ensue, as with most informal interactions with French people, who seem much more vested in politics in general then Americans, but not exactly the conversation that i ended up having. At some point i mentioned to the talkative driver that i was slightly surprised by the time it took me to get a cab, to which his response was that many cab drivers in Paris are racist and worry when picking up “un noir ou un maghrebien” (black or north african). He explained that these drivers cited personal security as the justification for their bigotry, while he found this to be more of an excuse then a reason. The first essential difference that i noted as a result of this conversation btw America and France was that the black stereotype spilled over to north Africans, who usually have much lighter skin then the Africans that one might find in Paris even more so then Latinos is SF had gotten it in my experience. The second being that, in actuality, even the troublemakers wear clothes that do not provide the visual distinction that a 7x black hoodie and some size 42 jeans do, which causes skin color to stain much more then in America. In America, the tendency is that if you are well dressed then that superceeds the would be stereotypes that might come with your skin color. So, is there is really no escaping french pre judging through outward appearance without looking like an old man? I guess we colored folks are left to running with groups of well dressed white people to break through the stronghold of stereotype.