How Race Relations Leads To Identity Formation In Stranger In The Village

In “Stranger in the Village” Baldwin describes the importance of race relations and how it leads to identity formation. Baldwin spends a winter in the remote village of Leurkerbad, Switzerland in which he finds a population that has never encountered a black man before. These villagers treat him with a dehumanized, exotic wonder (363) before become personally interested and attempting to integrate him into their society. Baldwin notes that these villagers are not innately unkind but in their innocence the villagers repeated the same offenses he experienced in America. Baldwin cannot help but think that white Americans would like to revert to the villager’s innocence, stating that America was founded by Europeans ignorant of an African’s humanity but the American experience has made the black man an “inescapable part of the general social fabric” (367).
Baldwin argued that Americans struggled with equalizing themselves with black men because it challenged the dominance of their race (368), a race which had dictated the terms of civilization for centuries. Denying the black man the equal status of humanity meant they either had to weaken their positions of freedom or grant them the same access to democracy, an idea that Baldwin argues was more difficult than creating a new sovereign nation and identity from Europe. White and black Americans share a unique history, one which cannot be ignored or rationalized. Americans cannot try to revert to a European innocence and Stranger in the village, which Baldwin says is “one of the greatest errors Americans can make”