The reference to Josephine Baker was as obvious as it was disrespectful and incomprehensible. One of the most iconic performances of the American-born dancer, actor and activist in the 1920s involved Baker in a (rubber) banana skirt, at a time when France took pride in displaying what it claimed was its superiority over the territories of its colonial empire. But Baker was far more than the act whose erotic charge she deliberately chose to subvert through exaggerated, clownish gestures. She was a member of the French Resistance, a recipient of France’s highest military honours, the only woman to speak at the 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr, and the only Black woman interred in Le Panthéon, the national mausoleum for France’s greatest figures. I was therefore dismayed to see the Baker legend reduced to a grotesque, minstrel show-like grimace.