Stranger In The Village Analysis
Eng 1A
The Battle for Identity In the essay “Stranger in the Village” written by James Baldwin in 1953 from Notes of A Native Son, the author mainly describes the idea of racism from both black and white people perspectives and how it affects to the America society as well as throughout the whole world. This essay was written during the time of Jim Crow Law and the onset of the Civil Right War; hence, it mostly implies the idea of racism in the US. The grief, pain, frustration and devastation that black people had to endure were so great that they had to choose between standing up to fight for their own rights or just staying the same as low life people as they had been. The whites also had to struggle a battle in their mind which they …show more content…
“But in the situation in which Americans… is the very warp and woof of the heritage of the West, the idea of supremacy.” (6) For centuries, the whites had considered themselves to be more superior than any other races, especially to the black people. They were so proud of themselves and so afraid of losing the superior status that they started to give themselves the right to treat the blacks inhumanly. The whites’ mind was simply blinded by the “jewel of naiveté”, which implies the idea that the white people were so immature that they couldn’t understand or show sympathy to other people, beat in their head the concept of white supremacy. Nonetheless, they were, all of sudden, required to treat the black equally as themselves and start living together with the blacks as a whole society as the must. It’s obviously indescribably hard since the habit of treating the blacks as a tool or a slave, which was established and practiced for so long, couldn’t be changed in a short amount of time. Especially, this change wasn’t merely a daily activity but the perspective toward other people or toward the black people in this
The Battle for Identity In the essay “Stranger in the Village” written by James Baldwin in 1953 from Notes of A Native Son, the author mainly describes the idea of racism from both black and white people perspectives and how it affects to the America society as well as throughout the whole world. This essay was written during the time of Jim Crow Law and the onset of the Civil Right War; hence, it mostly implies the idea of racism in the US. The grief, pain, frustration and devastation that black people had to endure were so great that they had to choose between standing up to fight for their own rights or just staying the same as low life people as they had been. The whites also had to struggle a battle in their mind which they …show more content…
“But in the situation in which Americans… is the very warp and woof of the heritage of the West, the idea of supremacy.” (6) For centuries, the whites had considered themselves to be more superior than any other races, especially to the black people. They were so proud of themselves and so afraid of losing the superior status that they started to give themselves the right to treat the blacks inhumanly. The whites’ mind was simply blinded by the “jewel of naiveté”, which implies the idea that the white people were so immature that they couldn’t understand or show sympathy to other people, beat in their head the concept of white supremacy. Nonetheless, they were, all of sudden, required to treat the black equally as themselves and start living together with the blacks as a whole society as the must. It’s obviously indescribably hard since the habit of treating the blacks as a tool or a slave, which was established and practiced for so long, couldn’t be changed in a short amount of time. Especially, this change wasn’t merely a daily activity but the perspective toward other people or toward the black people in this