6.1 James Baldwin – "Stranger in the Village" (1953)

Author/context: Baldwin (1924–1987), African-American novelist and essayist, spent a summer in Leukerbad, a tiny Swiss mountain village — and recorded what it means to be the first Black man its people had ever seen. The essay appeared in Harper's Magazine and later in Notes of aNative Son (1955), years before the US civil-rights legislation of the 1960s.Synopsis: The villagers stare, touch his hair, discuss him, and children shout at him in the street — without malice, out of pure novelty. Baldwin reflects that he is a stranger there, yet in America — a nation built partly by enslaved Africans — he is not a stranger at all: Black Americans are inseparable from the West's own history. The village's innocence about race is, he argues, a delusion; the "stranger" carries a history the village does not know it shares. He ends by predicting that the West must finally accept its own mixed identity.Themes: otherness and the outsider; race as a social construction; innocence vs guilt of nations; history and memory; identity.Legal issues raised:1. Racial discrimination and equality before law — the world was then building the anti- discrimination order: the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD, 1965) makes racial equality a treaty obligation.2. The law cannot directly police a stare — Baldwin shows discrimination living…