28 pages • 56 minutes read
Stranger in the Village
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The End of Innocence
Baldwin suggests that white Americans are trying to return to a pre-slavery innocence like the one still affected by the Swiss villagers, and he suggests that this attempt is doomed from the start because it simply cannot be done. Each American already has a perspective on Black people: “I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive” (125, 129). Consider the following key quote about innocence: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster” (129). Baldwin is arguing that even attempting to remain in innocence after its moment has passed makes one monstrous. Innocence is lost with “the promptness with which [white American men] decided that these black men were not really men but cattle” (124). White peoples’ attitudes toward others was “to conquer and to convert” them (120). In all cases, the initial attitude of white people toward others, then, was an attitude of dominance. This attitude has broken, and with it Americans must lose their innocence, according to Baldwin.
The Swiss villagers, by contrast, still have what Baldwin calls “the luxury of looking on me as a stranger” (129). For them, “Europe’s black possessions remained—and do remain—in Europe’s colonies, at which remove they represented no threat whatever to European identity” (125). White Americans have no such “luxury,” and the Black man, Baldwin explains, has “toward all white men an attitude which is designed, really, either to rob the white man of the jewel of his naïveté, or else to make it cost him dear” (122). This is to say that Black Americans did and do pose a threat to white Americans’ identity: “[T]he evolution of [Black] identity was a source of the most intolerable anxiety in the minds and the lives of his masters” (125). Without the “luxury” of distance the Swiss have, Baldwin claims, white Americans cannot hold onto the innocence their ancestors held when they went about conquering and converting those they met. Consider the two moments described in the text, separated by “a dreadful abyss,” when Baldwin is called an n-word. In the first case Baldwin describes, the Swiss children call him “Neger!” and he responds with a forced smile (118-19). The word signifies “wonder: I am a stranger here” (124). In the second case, Americans call him the n-word and it has the violence of war. The world has passed the end of innocence, Baldwin concludes, and there is no going back.
The Making of American Identities
Although Baldwin is purportedly writing about his experience in a Swiss village, his deeper concern is for the creation of American identities—Black and white alike. Baldwin describes American identity production as a “long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations” (127). And in this battle, “the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity” (127). Baldwin takes a common notion—that Black people had to establish their identities in America, having lost them in the Atlantic passage—a step further when he argues that the long battle “has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too” (129). Significantly, this takes the focus away from Black peoples’ struggle and raises questions about the struggle white people now face—to come to terms with their new post-innocent identities. Baldwin emphasizes that “the battle for [Black] identity has long ago been won” (127). What remains is for white people to adjust themselves to their new positions.
Problematically, this means that white Americans must divest not only from innocence but also from their positions of power. Baldwin writes, “Thus it was impossible for [white] Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men” (127). What Baldwin means here is that the difference established in the systematic enslavement of Black people is no longer tenable; yet, at the same time, to accept that that difference was a fabrication used to justify slavery would prove too great a burden for white people to bear. At stake here is human recognition, for Black people, and power, for white people.
A part of this power exertion of white people over Black people, which extends from the period of systematic enslavement, is that white people have notions about what it means to be Black. But Baldwin inverts this power dynamic by making the compelling case 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” (123). In other words, instead of showing white people who Black people are, this power dynamic reveals the identity of the white person to the Black person. These are the core values of the white American, and it is they who must come to understand themselves in a post-innocent manner. Black people, on the other hand, can “fashion out of [their] experience that which will give [them] sustenance, and a voice” (128).
Changing Colors
Baldwin’s final conclusion is that “[t]his world is white no longer, and it will never be white again” (129). Following the supporting themes of innocence and American identities, this means that persons of color have a definite place in the world—and in America—and that white people must adjust to the changes that have occurred.
Baldwin makes the provocative assertion that “the establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men” (126). At the core of Baldwin’s claim is the belief that white supremacy lies at the base of Western heritage. In this way, changing government types was not so radical a change as the change that included Black people in that government. White supremacy presumes that white people created civilization “and are therefore civilization’s guardians and defenders” (127). Baldwin writes, “Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men” (127). White peoples’ very identities were at stake, and the change threatened to take them from their position of power. The following quote suggests the heart of the issue: “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). Once again Baldwin inverts a common frame. Instead of accepting the notion that the “American Negro problem” (127) has to do with Black people, Baldwin spins it around and contends that the real problem is for white people to deal with.
In the final paragraph of the essay, Baldwin notes that what “distinguishes [white] Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa” (129). This is significant because, despite all the shame and guilt, Americans as a group of multiracial people have survived. The perpetual problem, Baldwin writes, has been “perpetually met” (129). In this way, Baldwin’s text takes on an optimistic tone even though many of its moments appear dismal and challenging. He has laid out what is required: for white people to put aside their innocence and establish their identities in relation to black people, and also for Black people to create their own identities. Baldwin says, “But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth” (128). There is a major possibility here for Black people (to “accept the status which myth […] gives me” [128]), and Baldwin appears confident the myth can be changed.
Unlock all 28 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By James Baldwin
