Adieu, Utopia : Paris seemed a refuge from bias to African-Americans. Now rising ethnic tensions threaten the myth.

PARIS — Twenty-five years ago, Tony Clarke hopped a plane bound for Paris with a one-way ticket, $40 in his pocket and romantic visions of a colorblind French society.

Like many African-Americans, he had come to seek his fortune in this European mecca that “Native Son” author Richard Wright had ecstatically described as “a place where your color is the least important thing about you.”

“I was all into the fantasy of a liberal France, the Josephine Baker mythology that I grew up with,” says Clarke, 46, referring to the black American singer and dancer who won international acclaim in the 1920s for her provocative performances at the renowned Folies Bergere cabaret. “I love being here--but the reality is, it is no racial utopia.”

Clarke’s fantasies were fueled by tales of African-American achievement in France as blacks in the United States battled discrimination on all fronts--on the job, in housing and in the classroom. From the days of slavery through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Paris provided a refuge for black Americans--musicians, dancers, writers and artists--seeking to realize their creative talents in exile. Among them were Baker, Wright, James Baldwin and Melvin Van Peebles.

But although many black Americans still feel that France is generally more racially tolerant than the United States, things are changing. A dramatic influx of West African immigrants, combined with high unemployment, has heightened racial tensions between blacks and whites. For the first time, black Americans in France are beginning to encounter the kind of discrimination that the French used to reserve for Arabs.

“Before, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, all of the racial prejudice in France was directed toward North Africans,” says Barbara Chase Riboud, a sculptor and writer from Philadelphia who moved here in 1958. “But that changed when the immigrant population started to change.”

Based on his experience, Clarke too is ambivalent about today’s racial climate.

“I’m walking down the street one day with a white colleague after a business meeting when this white policeman jumps out and asks me for my papers,” he says, sitting in a Parisian cafe where James Brown’s song “I Feel Good” is playing in the background. “We’re both in suits. He asks me what’s in my bag and then starts going through it.

“He says he’s looking for drugs. When he doesn’t find any, he turns and walks back to the car, then yells back, ‘Ce n’est pas racial’ (‘It’s not racial’),” says Clarke, a choreographer who has lived in Paris since 1967. “Yeah, right. It’s not racial when I can see some white guys nearby smoking a doobie and you can smell it all the way over where we are.”

Jeffery Smith, 38, a singer from New York, has a different story. Smith says he was never invited back to sing at a popular nightclub on St. Germain de Pres after he expressed his displeasure with a statue in blackface on a stairwell. The likeness was of a man with grotesquely swollen eyes and big lips, holding out a serving tray.

“I told the owner it was offensive, but he refused to remove it,” says Smith.

Despite occasional incidents like these, American blacks frequently enjoy a degree of entree and privilege that local blacks don’t.

“It’s very different from the States in many respects,” says Tannie Stovall, 55, a civil engineer with the Paris public works department. “Americans tend to group anything black together, whereas the French distinguish between blacks from Martinique and Guadeloupe, blacks from West Africa and blacks from the States. They don’t lump everyone together into the same category.”

Stovall, who left Atlanta 20 years ago for a teaching position at the University of Paris, says he does not experience the level of racial prejudice that he does back home.

“If I go to places I’ve never been to before, I get much better treatment in France than I do in the United States,” he says. “When you go to Santa Monica and walk into a department store, you get the feeling that a lot of eyes are on you when there is no reason to think a 50-something-year-old man is going to shoplift some postcards. That kind of thing doesn’t happen here.”

Poet James A. Emanuel, 71, says living in Paris was the first time that he “did not have to be on guard for being black.”

“Home is a place where you are always treated with affection, and I don’t know any place like that other than right where I am sitting,” the soft-spoken Nebraskan says as he sits in his apartment in Montparnasse. “I wouldn’t say I would never go back to the States, but I can’t think of one thing there that I can’t get here.”

And while black Americans have held a certain mystique for Paris, Paris has also held a certain mystique for black Americans.

Back in the ‘20s, poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and writer Claude McKay journeyed to the banks of the Seine. Later, after World War II, many black GIs disillusioned by the discrimination that awaited them back home chose to remain in France, marrying Frenchwomen.

“When the expatriates were coming over, they came as political exiles, and their reasons were racial,” says Michel Fabre, author of “Black American Writers in France 1840-1980: From Harlem to Paris.”

In the forward to Fabre’s book, writer Kenneth Kinnamon adds: “For many of us, thoughts of an American in Paris may elicit images of Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But Paris has been even more important for black writers over a longer period of time than for the white writers of the ‘20s, for whom it was a movable feast.”

But today, this adventurous breed of writers, painters and entertainers has given way to business people--engineers, architects, lawyers, interpreters and corporate executives. Many artists have been driven out by the skyrocketing cost of living and, for those not married to a French citizen, the difficulty in obtaining work papers.

“It used to be you could just come over and have someone in your family send you $100 a month,” says Stovall. “But now they’d have to send you at least $1,000--and even then, you’d have trouble getting by.”

In fact, a lot has changed since the 1920s when Baker performed her famous banana-belt dance before sellout crowds. Back then, the black African population was almost non-existent, its few members easily melding into the fabric of French society. The numbers of black Americans were too small to even figure into the racial equation. For decades, France’s largest immigrant population consisted of people of Arab descent, mainly from Algeria, a former French colony.

But since the late ‘70s, hundreds of thousands of West Africans, mainly from Mali and Senegal, have migrated to France. Many are women and children of little means. According to government figures, France’s African population has quadrupled, to more than 350,000 people, in the last 15 years. Most of these new immigrants reside in Paris and its surrounding suburbs, a metropolitan area of more than 10.5 million residents.

France also now has a burgeoning black population not just of West Africans but also of Haitians, West Indians and other immigrants from its former colonies.

Meanwhile, ethnic tensions between whites and black minorities have been on the rise in recent times, fanned by the right-wing National Front led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.

A recent government report attempting to test the racial waters sent out mixed signals. On a positive note, the study found that racially motivated violence in France had declined 50% in 1992 compared to the previous year. However, a survey of 1,017 Frenchmen also found that 55% expressed racist sentiments; 20% of those identified themselves as strongly racist.

Yet what makes the racial equation in France far more complex than in the United States is the fine distinction maintained here between race and class.

“If someone comes to France and they are an African prince brought up in England, schooled in Switzerland and speak French perfectly, they’re going to be accepted,” says Liz Goodrum, who worked with Patrick Kelly, the flamboyant black fashion designer who conquered the international world of haute couture only to be struck down by bone marrow disease and a brain tumor.

“In America, they don’t care how much education you have,” she adds. “If you’re black, you have to prove yourself.”

Like most Americans who have the opportunity to travel abroad, the 1,000 or so American blacks living in Paris tend to be college-educated and middle- to upper-income.

“It’s like in the United States, when they talk about the success of Japanese immigrants. They’re not seeing the poor people but those who had the means to come over in the first place,” says Ellen Kountz, 22, a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania who works as a systems support analyst for the bank company J. P. Morgan.

On the other hand, many black Frenchmen work at menial jobs and have few opportunities to get ahead. Despite their numbers, few French blacks hold any positions of power in government; they are rarely seen in advertisements for consumer products, and the one job that they appear to dominate is city street cleaner.

Unlike their counterparts in the United States, blacks in France are made up of various ethnic groups who have opted to remain outside the political process. Although some civil rights activists have been working to infuse these diverse groups with a sense of political consciousness, their efforts have been largely unsuccessful.

“There’s just not the same kind of unity--the sense of coming together to try to do something--as there is among blacks in the United States,” Clarke says. “A lot of it is that people are still living tribal, self-sufficient lives. But another part of it is (that) the French discourage people from holding onto their ethnic heritage. When you come over here, they want you to give up your heritage to become a Frenchman, so a lot of the blacks have no sense of identity.”

But despite the drawbacks, black Americans continue to flock to Paris, attracted by the advantages of a European lifestyle.

“Paris is the pleasure capital of the world,” says Randy Garrett, a 48-year-old Seattle native who came for a visit in 1973, opened a barbecue restaurant and never left. “It’s a very special, hedonistic city. The buildings are beautiful. The food is beautiful. The women are beautiful. They make everything beautiful and sensuous.”