The seeds for this book started back in the late 1990s when I was conducting research in France on the radical right vote in Europe. I remember seeing a large protest for the release of Mumia Abu Jamal, who had been on death row in the US after being convicted for the 1981 shooting death of a Philadelphia police officer. A protest in Paris seemed ironic to me at the time, given that many of the French people marching to save this African American man rarely considered the plight of Algerian immigrants who lived in poverty in the Parisian banlieues (suburbs). This despite the fact that the movie La Haine had done much when it debuted in 1995 to lay bare the life of immigrants in those suburbs and the police violence and oppression they faced.

This book is informed by my experience conducting research on issues related to immigration and race in Europe since the 1990s, as well as my experiences as an African American woman growing up in the post-civil rights era US. My experiences as a researcher and academic frame the way that I approach this analysis of the connections between the US and Europe, particularly the way that ideas and policies have developed around race, and their impacts on the African Diaspora. I’m embarrassed to say that although I studied international relations at Stanford University and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), I didn't understand the significance of pioneers in my field, like Merze Tate and Ralph Bunch, until much later in my career.

My experiences in doing research in Europe over the next 15 years would provide me with regular opportunities to observe the difficulties that politicians there had dealing with issues of race. I remember attending an “equity summit” in Berlin where an official in Angela Merkel's administration told me that Germany didn't have much experience dealing with issues of racism, this despite the fact that Germany has had a significant ethnic minority presence since at least the 1970s. Many of those immigrants only got access to citizenship in 1998 when the citizenship policies were liberalized.