They were real and they were concrete. Theaters were segregated. Hotels were segregated. Clubs that employed Black entertainers did not necessarily permit Black audiences. The performers who drew the crowds could not, in many cities, eat at the restaurants near the theaters where they performed. The highest levels of American entertainment were not fully available to Baker because of her skin, and she knew it.
In 1925, she was offered a position in a revue called *La Revue Nègre*, which was being organized for a Paris debut. She was nineteen years old. She accepted.
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## Paris and the Transformation
Paris in 1925 was not a city without racism. France had a colonial empire that stretched across Africa and Southeast Asia, and the specific dynamics of that empire — the extraction of labor and resources from colonized peoples, the elaborate ideological justifications for subjugation, the deeply embedded belief in a hierarchy of civilizations that placed European culture at the top — were woven into French cultural life in ways that shaped how audiences and critics encountered performers like Baker.
The “exotic” framing that made Baker famous in Paris was not simply admiration; it was a form of primitivism, a fascination with what white European audiences perceived as untamed, natural, primitive energy in contrast to their own cultivated civilization. When Baker performed the “Danse Sauvage” — the wild dance number that was the sensation of *La Revue Nègre* — she was feeding an appetite that had been shaped by colonial ideology. She wore a skirt of artificial bananas. She was billed and marketed as exotic, primitive, and dangerous.