The New Wave: Black by Popular Demand

I settled in lower Manhattan in 1985   for a few months as a tourist. One year later I returned to the Bronx but was hopping around Jersey, Harlem and even lived in Queens for a minute. Brooklyn was where I felt the most comfortable.  It didn’t take too long to digest the overcrowded sidewalks, yellow cabs and subways since French people use these types of transportation as well. It was harder to get use to the toughness of the city and its rhythms. What surprised me the most was seeing so many black people having job positions that I had never seen them doing in my country: cab drivers, construction workers, accountants, policeman and some even on national TV. I discovered BET and I liked it. And those women!  So beautiful, with so many different shades, haircuts and styles. 

Then I met a DJ working on a black radio station (something also new to me). DJ Chuck Chillout chaperoned my discovery of a blossoming culture in Hip Hop. My passion for DJ’ing evolved at the same pace as my interest for Black America. It’s so different from what the media chooses to broadcast. It pushed me to garner a Masters in Sociology, as well as wanting to share those observations through my freelance writing. This is how I met Reverend Fred Davie, whose multiple conversations helped me better understand the scope of what Black America could come to be rather than the pop clichés. The Reverend declared that there wasn’t just one Black America.  They spanned from Harlem to Brooklyn, the East Coast to the West, and most had their roots in the South and in the church. Other friends more in tune with Hip Hop, specifically the Haitian-American Celestin family, would broaden my view on what it is to be a black man in this country. These discussions also brought up questions within myself
about how it is to be black and French.


Now I am a true journalist. I am interviewing rap stars, witnessing the black entrepreneurial spirit that pumps from NYC, and hanging out with my people. My experiences with these men and women so deeply affect and shape me as a new man that when I go back to France, I feel as an outcast. I no longer feel at home there - no more images of black success, role models, beautiful black women, strong black men, a sense of Black pride and of community. None of this makes sense in my country and that makes us as “invisible” as Ralph Ellison once denounced. In France, I shrink like a live wire seeing my brothers and sisters with no sense of themselves in their eyes and their haircuts, but especially in our empty discussions. Whether we are from the Caribbean or Africa, France still never treated blacks with any respect. But Black Americans could lose their blackness since their ‘’American’’ tag gained them honor and respect in French society.

America may have first discovered that we (French Blacks) exist when Newsweek put the French-Canadian rapper MC Solaar in one of its issues back in the day.  But it’s more than 10 years later, through an uprising from the poor and the frustrated, that the entire world discovered a new and “embarrassing” image of France far from that of the beret and baguette. Discrimination, social apartheid, racism and colonialism had taken their toll in the very country that touts the ideals of Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood. 

A hypocrisy slap right to the face. A lesson comparable to the Rodney King episode. I titled my book Les Suprêmes, la Révolution Vibracultic. It’s 360 pages that pay homage to all those doers of this incredible generation that have made an effort to create - placing a new culture under the international spotlight, expressing their conditions and overcoming “unbeatable” obstacles by reaching the highest point of international representation. These efforts have made them worldwide superstars. They have invented a new status, designed new inventions and generated new creators. 


This story is one of sacrifice, work, barriers, talent, violence, determination, success and a monumental energy that has helped me grow as a Frenchman.  It’s a story that builds a new society where youth energy has become the norm. With the fibers of Black culture at the center of the modern world that effects everyone, in spite of the “exception culturelle”, the French are included.

www.Les-Supremes.com