Notes of a Native Son

Baldwin understates the role of antiblack racism in the formation of European civilization. Accordingly, he is misleading in his assessment of antiblackness in modern Europe. He speaks from the perspective of the tail-end of that generation or two of Black Americans who were able to flee US-style racism and find relative safe harbor in Europe. Black artists and intellectuals, mainly, but others as well, found respite in Europe from the violence of Jim Crow-era America during the first half of the twentieth century. The absence in Europe of segregationist policies and interracial paranoias meant Black American artists were more marketable there than in the US. There were many contributing factors to their experience, but today, historians of Black Europe and the Black Atlantic (the interpersonal, political, and cultural connections among African-descended peoples on both sides of the Atlantic) acknowledge that antiblack racism is as endemic to European society as it is to those in the Americas. Indeed, since the turn of the twenty-first century, Europe has been facing a rise in African in-migration, and the tragic scenes of African migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea and drowning in sight of European shores, from whence humanitarian aid has been in short supply, has forced it to confront its antiblackness anew.

In this light, “Stranger in the Village” puts the strengths and weaknesses of Baldwin’s early essays, collected in Notes of a Native Son, on full display. As he does throughout Notes of a Native Son, in this essay, Baldwin uses his personal experience to model the political vulnerability that he believes is necessary to positively alter the American landscape. Baldwin models the honest self-reflection and truth-telling that are signposts of the Black prophetic tradition from abolitionists such as David Walker and Frederick Douglass to civil rights leaders, such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King, Jr. These qualities are requisite for taking stock of one’s inner demons, for engaging in frank dialogue across boundaries of race, class, and sex, and for the courage to face one’s oppressors.

In Baldwin’s hands, these qualities yield door-opening insights. For instance, he writes in “Stranger in the Village”:

There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born, between the children who shout Neger! today and those who shouted N*****! Yesterday […] the abyss is experience, the American experience. […] 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 (85).

He goes on to elucidate how American slaveholding has robbed White Americans of their own European genealogy. They may be of European stock, but the racist enterprise that they have helped to build in the Americas has effectively supplanted any lived memory of the civilization from whence they originated, allowing them to endlessly deceive themselves about who they are in the world.

“Stranger in the Village” also points up one of the weaknesses of Baldwin’s early essays. He is a master of the American psyche, both White and Black, but his experience of the African Diaspora is limited. Slavery produced modern Europe as much as it did the Americas. There was a robust Black internationalism from the early twentieth-century through the Cold War period that led to the development of Pan-Africanism in which African-descended peoples across the Diaspora connected with Africans on the continent struggling for their independence from European colonizers. Black Americans of this era thought of themselves in global terms and sought to advance racial justice through internationalist methods. Pan-Africanism in its various forms, however, was stridently repressed by the US government. People like Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois had their passports seized to prevent them from traveling abroad.

Richard Wright, Baldwin’s frequent object of criticism in his early essays, was among these earlier generations with an internationalist experience. Wright had traveled the globe before Baldwin published his first book of essays. By the time Baldwin’s generation emerged, this Pan-Africanism had waned. Baldwin’s move to Europe did not expand his perspective beyond American shores. Ironically, Baldwin employed his critical vantage point from Europe in a way that only deepened his American myopia.