“…the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motived by the need to establish an identity” (Baldwin 165). This is a few steps away from Hegel’s master/slave interaction. While Baldwin is correct in his statement, it is not, however, confined to the white man/black man phenomenon. We could easily replace the players with women, gay, lesbian, rich, uneducated, etc.
I am left wondering why Baldwin decided to go back to this “tiny Swiss village” where the children shout Neger! While I am not saying he, or anyone else, does not have the right to go someplace unmolested, I am also a realist. I am not advocating we all stay “where we belong.” I know he found the village a place where he could get work done, but I am curious why he would want to be so “stood out”? I know, very well, the feeling of being the “outsider,” and the rage that comes with the knowledge of not belonging, not being seen as a full human being. I also wonder if Mr. Baldwin, a New Yorker, took his two-week vacation in, let’s say Georgia, Mississippi, or Alabama? Would he be seen as “uppity”? Would he feel the rage of an African American male, who has lost his heritage? I agree with Baldwin when he writes, “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them” (Baldwin 160). We carry our history on our skin and in our psyche. Even when we endeavor to escape it, even all the way to a tiny Swiss village, we carry it with us. He understood that when the villagers would touch his hair
or his hand these acts were done with “genuine wonder,” and yet his own tortured mind caused these actions to bring him back to the history of abuse that he and his forefathers suffered at the hands of white men. I understand the tendency to be conflicted. The want to be accepted for just me, but still the reservoir of rage hinders my full inclusion into the “inside.”
He explains how the villagers donate money and the way the young boys dress up as black boys to solicit for money to “buy” African natives in hopes of converting them to Christ. He writes of the white man, and his dreaded arrival in Africa. I am again left wondering if when the white man first arrived, to buy slaves, if the natives would have banned together and either killed off the white man, or at least sent them packing, would the slave trade have flourished as it did. When one tribe saw it as an opportunity to get rid of their rivals they had a hand in the slave trade.
I also wonder if the nations that black men inhabited were the countries that were more established, and explored the world, and the nations with white men became the enslaved; how would the discourse sound?
I empathize with Baldwin when he writes, “I am told that there are Haitians able to trace their ancestry back to African kings, but any American Negro wishing to go back so far will find his journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature on the bill of sale which serves as the entrance paper for his ancestor” (Baldwin 163). I think that the destruction of self- identity, self-esteem, and cultural identity are the root causes for many of
today’s issues within the African American community.
I suggest that readers watch D. L. Hughley’s The Endangered Species List. It is his attempt to put the black man on the endangered list. He employs comedy and the tragic conditions that are contributing to the “young, black man’s endangerment.”
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. "Stranger in the Village." Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. 159-175. Print.