Stranger in the Village

“In so far as I reacted at all, I reacted by trying to be pleasant—it being a great part of the American Negro’s education (long before he goes to school) that he must make people ‘like’ him. This smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you routine worked about as well in this situation as it had in the situation for which it was designed, which is to say that it did not work at all.”

Baldwin employs humor to make a point about how Black Americans are taught to survive in the allegedly white world (which Baldwin will go on to contest). He reacts to being called “Neger” in the Swiss village—even though it resonates uncomfortably with being called the n-word in the US—by putting on a smile. It does not do anything but make the chanters feel more comfortable. Baldwin is identifying an ineffectual survival strategy that he will supplant later in the essay.

“The white man takes the astonishment [of the Africans] as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence.”

Baldwin contrasts his mind with that of “the white man,” who strives “to conquer and to convert” those he encounters. By contrast, Baldwin finds himself not desiring conquest or conversion but on the obverse side of the equation, as the conquered and converted person. Whereas white people can refuse to acknowledge the shared humanity of Black people, Black Americans cannot avoid confrontation with whiteness because of this contrasting dynamic. This quote suggests that the relationship is twice unequal: first, in the conqueror/conquered dynamic; and second, in the ignorance/rage dynamic.

“Yet they move with an authority which I shall never have; and they regard me, quite rightly, not only as a stranger in their village but as a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything they have—however unconsciously—inherited.”

The authority with which Baldwin witnesses Swiss villagers moving is the authority of being a part of Western civilization. Baldwin stands apart because of his race, and he is cut off both from the civilization they inherit and from the civilization lost in Africa because of racialized enslavement. Baldwin is both an outsider and a straggler in the minds of the white Swiss villagers, who take their relationship with Western culture for granted. This connection to culture and civilization will later come into play in terms of white supremacy and the struggle white Americans are in to maintain their positions of power.

“What is crucial here is that, since white men represent in the black man’s world so heavy a weight, white men have for black men a reality which is far from being reciprocal; and hence all black men have toward all white men an attitude which is designed, really, either to rob the white man of the jewel of his naiveté, or else to make it cost him dear.”

The effect of this lack of a connection to civilization—either African or European—is that white people have a large, unreciprocated effect on Black people. Baldwin here describes two possible responses to this loss of cultural connection. First, Black men refuse to allow white people to maintain their claim to innocence; second, Black men make the price for that claim to innocence steep. In both cases what is at stake is white peoples’ innocence, which is the keystone to their position of power.

“What one’s imagination makes of other people is dictated, of course, by the laws of one’s own personality and it is one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is.”

Baldwin identifies an irony in the way that the white imagination about Black people reveals more about white people than Black people. That is, white people have certain ideas about what it means to be Black, but in reality these ideas have more to say about what it means to be white than what it means to be Black. They reveal the inner psychical attachments to a particular notion of Blackness, which in turn reveals the inner self of those whose psyche produces such a notion.

“There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born, between children shouting Neger! today and those who shouted N*****! yesterday—the abyss is experience, the American experience. The syllable hurled behind me today expresses, above all, wonder: I am a stranger here. But I am not a stranger in America and the same syllable riding on the American air expresses the war my presence has occasioned in the American soul.”

Baldwin marvels at the way the same sounds can mean something almost entirely different, given a different context. The “American experience,” in which Black people play an integral part, disallows Americans from treating Black people as strangers, as do the Swiss villagers. Because Black people play such an integral part in American history, the n-word epithet is loaded with centuries of conflict, whereas the Swiss version of the same word comes across as suggesting only a form of difference, strangeness, and wonder. This is a key passage for understanding the contrast Baldwin is drawing between Swiss villagers, and particularly Swiss children, and white Americans, particularly white American men.

“The identity of the American Negro comes out of this extreme situation, and the evolution of this identity was a source of the most intolerable anxiety in the minds and the lives of his masters.”

The “extreme situation” Baldwin describes is American slavery and the effects of the Atlantic Passage. In particular, Baldwin is addressing the ways that enslaved Black people dealt with the loss of cultural connection that enslavement entailed. The challenge for Black people is to adapt American culture to themselves; it is this adaptation that produces such a strong “anxiety in the minds” of white people. Baldwin later notes that the battle for establishing Black identity has already been won, meaning that the current challenge for white people is coming to terms with the presence of Black people alongside them in culture.

“But in America, even as a slave, he was an inescapable part of the general social fabric and no American could escape having an attitude toward him. Americans attempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro, but the very nature of these abstractions reveals the tremendous effects the presence of the Negro has had on the American character.”

Baldwin emphasizes the inescapable presence of Black people in the US. Unlike Europeans, for whom slavery occurred at a remove in the colonies and could therefore be ignored, for Americans the presence of Black people has been unavoidable. White peoples’ attempts “to make an abstraction” of Black people is the effort to make a caricature of human beings who can never be put inside of a box; these caricatures tell us something about the impact Black people have had on the US. For instance, the presentation of Blackness as correlated with dirt shows us the need white people have to feel clean through juxtaposition.

“But not to accept [the Black man] was to deny his human reality, his human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological.”

To deny the truth that Black people are human, white people had to make a series of explanations that bordered on obsession. On the flip side, Baldwin writes, white people could not accept Black peoples’ humanity without having their privileged position challenged. This paints a picture of the challenge Black people pose for white people: either acknowledge Black peoples’ humanity and sacrifice one’s privilege or reject Black peoples’ humanity and sacrifice one’s own humanity and sanity. Baldwin later adds that the latter option “turns [one] into a monster” (129).

“In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity.”

The “long battle” Baldwin mentions is the struggle to integrate the inescapable existence of Black people into the American social fabric. As Baldwin writes, “At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself” (127). This inverts the formulation of the “American Negro problem” as a problem for Black people. In this quote, Baldwin once again contrasts the conflicting aims of Black people and white people. White peoples’ defense of their identity denies Black people cultural access, while Black peoples’ establishing their identity threatens white peoples’ claim to superiority.

“[The African American man’s] survival depended, and his development depends, on his ability to turn his peculiar status in the Western world to his own advantage and, it may be, to the very great advantage of that world. It remains for him to fashion out of his experience that which will give him sustenance, and a voice.”

Because Black people have been denied a connection to historical cultures, Black people have had to pave their own ways. Baldwin acknowledges the costs and pain involved, and he suggests that this journey might well benefit not only Black people but also the entire world. As Baldwin has suggested that the battle is already won, the challenge from this point is to establish the kind of identity that gives one “sustenance, and a voice.” Because of how the speaker of this voice is positioned, significantly, their finding a voice might be to the benefit of a globalizing world coming to terms with multiracialism.

“Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist.”

Baldwin returns to the contrast between white and Black Americans. He notes that the innocence to which white people want to return never exists for Black people. Although they are in an entangled relationship, the relationship is on fundamentally unequal terms. Whereas Black people are cut off from their history, and therefore cannot “return,” white people endeavor to go back to a past they think they can remember, in which interracial entanglement had not yet happened.

“I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive.”

In this deceptively simple sentence, Baldwin reiterates his contention that no American can exist without having an attitude toward Black people. Many attitudes exist, from hate to love, but no American can claim that Black people are strangers in the land. Baldwin is simultaneously here making the case that Black people have “naturalized” in the sense that they are (and have been) as much a part of the history and culture of the United States as white people.