«One day in the late 1970s, the writer James Baldwin was explaining to an Arab friend that he wanted to go back to America after many years as an expatriate in France. "America has found a formula to deal with the demon of race," Baldwin told Syrian businessman Raja Sidawi, who had a house near him in St. Paul de Vence. In France and the rest of Europe, people pretended that the race problem didn't exist, Baldwin said, but "someday it will explode." (...) I lived for several years in France, returning to America a year ago, and I was always astonished by the French inability to reckon with racial divisions. You just didn't see black or brown faces in prominent positions -- not in the National Assembly, not on French television, not among business leaders, not in the media.»