Stranger in the Village

"Stranger in the Village" is an essay by the African-American novelist James Baldwin that was originally published in Harper's Magazine in 1953 and then included in his collection of essays Notes of a Native Son in 1955.^[1] The essay is an account of Baldwin's experiences in Leukerbad, Switzerland. Baldwin extrapolates much about the "White American's" relationship to the "Black Man" by contrasting this to the European ignorance of the African race.

Discussion

Throughout his essays, the discussion of history occurs repeatedly as James Baldwin considers sources and solutions to race relations in the United States. Baldwin recognizes history as a nightmare in “Stranger in the Village” during a trip to Switzerland in 1951. He states that “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them” (119). Baldwin talks about the relationship between American and European history, explicitly pointing out that American history encompasses the history of the Negro, while European history lacks the African-American dimension. Baldwin observes that in America the Negro is “an inescapable part of the general social fabric” and that “Americans attempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro” (“Stranger” 125). Baldwin argues that white Americans try to retain a separation between their history and black history despite the interdependence between the two. It is impossible for Americans to become European again—“recovering the European innocence”—through the neglect of the American Negro; the American Negro is a part of America permanently pressed and carved into an undeniable history (Baldwin, “Stranger 128). Baldwin’s stand on the importance of history is made by the conclusion of “Stranger in the Village.” This importance is expanded upon in the essay “Down at the Cross,” in which Baldwin speculates about the direction of America and directly associates the progress made by America as a function of the progress made by the American Negro.

Although Baldwin appears to be telling the story of his experiences in that tiny Swiss village, he uses the story as a metaphor for the history of race relations in the United States, and he describes the power discrepancy between whites of European background and African-Americans who were forcibly brought to the U.S. as slaves.

In " A Stranger in the Village," Baldwin relates his experiences in a small Swiss village composed of people who had never seen a Black man before he arrived in the village in the summer of 1951. Baldwin describes a kind of naive racism: children who shout "Neger!" when they see him, unaware of the echoes he hears from his past when others shouted a more damning word ("Nigger!") in the streets of New York City; local Catholic residents (the main religion of the village) who donate money to "buy" Africans so that missionaries can convert those Africans to Catholicism, told to Baldwin with pride, again without realizing the ominous undertones of that practice for a man who is a descendant of African slaves. Yet there is also a more sinister racism, even in a remote village that has direct experience with only one Black man: men who describe Baldwin as "le sale negre" (the dirty Black man) behind his back and assume that he stole wood from them, or of children who "scream in genuine anguish" when he approaches them because they have been taught that "the devil is a black man" (Baldwin 97).

Baldwin uses his experiences in that Swiss village to reflect upon racial history in the U.S., where a population of white European-Americans had to grapple with the reality of enslaved Black men and women who looked different from them, whose humanity and rights as human beings became a central, continually unresolved question. The final sentence in his essay articulates a defiant claim by Baldwin and an understanding that the villagers' and white Americans' need to reach, losing thereby what Baldwin describes as "the jewel" of the white man's naivete - in other words, white Americans' willful desire to ignore white privilege and the effects of centuries of racism and systematic discrimination against Black Americans: "This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."

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