"Where are you from?" is probably the question that is asked most often to black people in France, the one that comes up most spontaneously in conversation.

"Where are you from?" asks a friend of a friend at a party, a neighbor at a meal, a colleague who claims to be getting to know me, a complete stranger. I am on a beach in Portugal. A young French girl jumps on me. "How beautiful your children are! Where are you from?"

I want to answer him: “Like you, from France!”

At six years old, Isabelle discovers that she is black. She dreams of embodying Mary in the living nativity scene of her school, she will be Balthazar, the wise man from Africa. For this little girl raised in a chic district of Paris, it is a shock. Everyday racism bursts into her life.

From Paris to Abidjan, from the benches of the Catholic school to the backstage of television, Isabelle Boni-Claverie tells her story. A black woman from a privileged background, she must nevertheless face the facts: in France, class does not erase race. Her lively and sharp pen interweaves this story with that of the incredible destiny of her grandfather, an African who became a magistrate of the French Republic in the 1930s and the husband of a young girl from Gaillac, the first woman in her town to marry a black man.

With sensitivity, Isabelle Boni-Claverie leads us to question our relationship with otherness. By turns funny, uncompromising, moving, she ends on an optimistic note by suggesting that we take a gamble on real equality.