Stranger in the Village

“Stranger in the Village” is an argumentative essay in which Baldwin makes a compelling case for the uniqueness of race relations in the US. He asserts that the sole way forward is for white people to abandon their illusions of innocence and acknowledge the United States’ mixed racial existence. The US is not white, Baldwin argues, and this fact cannot be denied without damaging oneself (129). Baldwin employs argumentative techniques including personal anecdotes, critical analysis, experiential evidence, and historical facts to support his concluding argument about Black people’s earned and irrevocable place in American society.

In the titular Swiss village, Baldwin appears strange because the villagers have never seen a Black person. His status as a stranger there contrasts with the status of Black people in the US, where the relationship between Black and white citizens has a unique and complex history. Much of Baldwin’s essay explicates the factors that shape and define that relationship. In one example, he compares the villagers use of racial epithets to American’s use of the n-word. By elucidating how the experience is different in the two locations, Baldwin uses contextualization to reinforce his argument about the unique and complex relationship that has developed between Black and white Americans.

By contrasting white Americans with white Europeans, Baldwin subverts the tired comparison between Black and white Americans. By the time Baldwin wrote this piece in the early 1950s, just on the cusp on the civil rights movement, dehumanizing myths had long been used to justify the unfair treatment of Black people in the US. However, by introducing the Swiss village as a comparative basis for understanding Black and white identities in America, Baldwin recontextualizes the subject. Baldwin’s fresh take suggests that the distinctly American situation has not only changed Black people, but it has also changed white people (129).

Consider the Swiss “bistro owner’s wife [who] beamed with a pleasure far more genuine than my own” as she told Baldwin about the six Africans they had “bought” to convert them to Christianity (120). Baldwin’s use of scare quotes around “bought” draws the reader’s attention to the layers of meaning in the word. It invokes the connotation related to the trans-Atlantic trading of enslaved people, thereby deepening the parallel relationship drawn between the US and the Swiss village.

The woman’s enthusiasm appears genuine, according to Baldwin, and so he does his best to respond with the “smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you routine” he says is part of “the American Negro’s education” (119). He avoids conflict in this way, and he also avoids taking responsibility for educating the woman. Her innocence is her own problem and will have to be dealt with one day, in Baldwin’s analysis. She is simply “trapped in history [as] history is trapped in [her]” (119). The significance of this quote is that people cannot escape the world into which they are born. While some degree of movement is possible, individual persons cannot be held to account for societal crimes against humanity, such as the systematic enslavement of Africans. This might seem to play against Baldwin’s claim that the world has changed and will never return to what it was before (i.e., white), except for the fact that change happens on a social level, for Baldwin. He goes so far as to say that the “battle” for Black Americans’ identity “has long ago been won” (127). This is to propose that the tide has already turned, and it is now a matter of white people getting in line with the change that has already taken place.

Another key textual development is the relationship between various people groups and civilization. Baldwin notes that the Swiss village may be remote and even primitive, but it’s still “the West” (121), and therefore endowed with power. The villagers represent those conquerors of Western European empires, which claim credit for creating the modern world. Once again, this sets up a juxtaposition with white Americans, whose connection to (white) Western civilization is thrown into question if they acknowledge the humanity of Black people (127).

Historically, Black Americans had the task, according to Baldwin, of establishing their identities, while white Americans had the task of defending their identities (127). By now, Baldwin argues, Black Americans have already won the battle to establish their identity, so the “American Negro problem” is best understood as a white problem—the problem of coming to terms with living alongside Black people as equals and recognizing their humanity (127). His statement about Black and white men’s respective roles in relation to their identities is an example of parallelism. Baldwin uses this technique to emphasize the contrast he’s illustrating. Baldwin subsequently details some of the contortions white people make in order to avoid addressing the problem, and provides concrete evidence: “lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession” (127). In both cases, whether exclusionary or inclusive, the purpose of the action is “to find a way around” or “come to terms with” (or both) living alongside Black people.

Baldwin identifies the unique position Black Americans hold not only for understanding the question of race relations in the US but for the world at large. While much of his analysis is focused on the US, he concludes: that “[t]his world is white no longer” (129). In other words, even the naïve and isolated Swiss will soon be held accountable for their position in a global society. This use of the term “world” further develops the idea of white Europeans believing they are the creators and guardians of civilization. To acknowledge that “this world is white no longer” (129), white people must cede their illusion of Black inhumanity. The whole, fragile structure of myths and rationalizations may topple, including the illusions of innocence and of the possibility of returning to an all-white existence.

Black Americans who find their voice will do so to the advantage not only of themselves but also of the world (128). Baldwin presents an example in the cathedral at Chartres. In this example, Baldwin suggests that where white people see God, he sees the devil—perhaps because he has “been identified with the devil” by others (128). Baldwin sees the gargoyles on parapets as “seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced,” and he identifies himself with the heretics who were thrown to their deaths down the crypt’s well (128). What is significant to note here is the way that Baldwin takes up the myths about Blackness (association with the devil and so on) in order to subvert and overcome them. That is, his identification with heretics follows from the fact that racialized persons are always already treated as heretics, and he draws attention to this historical detail to emphasize the way that his position as a Black man shifts the conversation about race.

Baldwin’s essay contests the common framing of race-related conversations in this historical moment by comparing the relationship between Black people and white Swiss villagers to that between Black people and white Americans. Baldwin argues that Black people are not strangers to “any American alive,” and therefore no American can cling to the hope of “returning to a state in which [B]lack men do not exist” (129). To try to deny their shared history is to deny reality; to be deemed monstrous and insane. Change has happened. Black people whose ancestors were forcibly taken have had to change to adapt to life in the US. At the same time, white identity has changed, and must now acknowledge the altered fabric of American culture.

The Swiss village, where a Black person is inevitably a stranger, represents an earlier phase of the relationship between Black and white people in the US. Baldwin is a stranger there because, unlike in the US, the village has not yet been forced to confront its racism by the presence of a Black population. This earlier phase represents a time before white Americans created myths to dehumanize Black people; before a new Black identity was created by the “extreme situation” of enslavement and oppression in America; before the effects of hidden rage and contempt took their toll; and before the inevitable truth of Black humanity was acknowledged. This unique and complex relationship between the United States’ Black and white citizens has created a culture of white people who are closer to Black people, both literally and symbolically, than any other white culture in the world. This puts the US much further along the path toward racial integration than many other parts of the world. This progress, even in the wake of so much interracial trauma, is cause for hope.