Selective Solidarity is an ethnography about middle-class Senegalese families in Paris. It foregrounds the experiences of the French-born children of educated immigrants from Dakar, to consider how young people learn to take part in economic relations. Analyzing everyday exchanges of language, food, and gifts in Senegalese households in Paris and Dakar, the book examines how children grapple with the multiple, and sometimes contradictory, moral expectations they encounter at home and abroad. It then asks what their practical struggles can tell us about the ways middle-class decline in Europe is impacting kinship connections in the African diaspora.Through fine-grained analysis of children’s and families’ daily lives, Selective Solidarity reveals how the racialized effects of middle-class decline in France radiate outward, reconfiguring transnational family connections and reproducing global inequalities of mobility within Senegalese families. The Senegalese parents I worked with all arrived in Paris fluent in French, on student or family visas. While they had held privileged positions back in Senegal, this offered precious little protection in the face of escalating tensions surrounding Islam and immigration in France. Middle-class Senegalese described feeling like they were under constant pressure to regulate their behaviors to communicate belonging in France, in the hopes that their children could avoid being categorized alongside stigmatized, lower-class immigrants. In addition to participant observation in Senegalese apartments in Paris, I accompanied families to Dakar on children’s summer vacations from school. Prolonged economic crisis in West Africa has made money and other resources sent from abroad critical sources of support for families. Remittances surpass the total sum of development aid that international donors provide the country. Whether or not migrants – and their children – recognize their kinship relations in Africa is critical to the material reproduction of Senegalese households.At its heart, Selective Solidarity is about children’s experiences sharing food and giving gifts in Paris and on trips to Dakar. This book considers questions that are central to experiences of family life in global capitalism, focusing on middle-class (downward) mobility to highlight the ways socioeconomic relations are redefined as resources are stretched thin. Global inequities are made palpable to children as they travel between France and Senegal, shifting between stigma and prestige on their summer vacations. Highlighting the uneven terrain of transnational kinship, Selective Solidarity examines families’ attempts to navigate tiered migration trajectories as heightened tensions surrounding migration reconfigure class structures globally.