Stranger in the Village

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.