The right to cultural identity

Geovanna Septimio Landivar

HSS-1-G-Freshman Seminar

Professor Christopher Nicholls

September 26, 2022

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Everyone has a history, a past, and an experience that has transformed the way we

interact and deal with our own culture. The culture associate material and symbolic elements

that define us within our community: theories, values, arts, backgrounds, customs, and

behaviors that organize and interrelate with each other and influence our socialization.

Socialization is a process of insertion that the individual carries out from the moment he is born

until the moment of his death, so that he can be inserted into a specific group that shares a set

of social and cultural values, creating a cultural identity and a sense of belonging. But what

happens when this cultural identity is lost, stolen, or silenced?

In “Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin documents his journey with cultural and racial

conflict. The story’s plot begins when Baldwin decides to visit a small village on top of the

mountains in Switzerland. The whiteness of the place reflects directly on his experience of being

the first black man ever to set foot in the European village. Baldwin describes the dynamics of

the villagers and tells what it was like to be the “attraction” of the city that looked at and treated

him as a stranger and a simply living wonder.

The narrative becomes a deep reflection where Baldwin analyzes the rage of the

disesteemed1, of his internal warfare — rage, dissembling, and contempt having inevitably

accompanied his first realization of the power of white men2, and this is justified by the fact that

black people need to handle within themselves a huge volume of unanswered answers from

white people and their racial injustices.

The challenges of racial and social inequality and cultural identity are interrelated.

Racism and discrimination contribute to a person’s alienation from their own culture. The
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attempt to stop being seen through the bias of these injustices, however, is not easy because

there is a good dose of willpower in the naivety of the white man, and that ends having no effect

since the white man it’s not willing to make the historical reparation that forces him to look at

his ancestors critically. In Baldwin’s essay, he states that there is no empathy in the racialized

world since the white man is unwilling to lose their privileges and clings to the legends that his

people created about blacks, blacks in turn, he can no longer see whites except for what whites

imagine about blacks.

Analyzing Baldwin’s narrative, we can understand how life experiences can transform the

interaction with our own culture. As a black man, Baldwin was culturally misunderstood by the

villagers for several historical and racial reasons, which are trapped in the history of our society.

His skin color and his hair texture were misapprehended, as was his ancestry; his way of talking,

walking, dancing, dressing, and his cultural and religious traditions were repudiated at a certain

moment in history when the white man took the astonishment as a tribute and adopted the

white superiority ideology; This astonishment creates a vast cultural identity conflict, where

black folk lives in a “white world” that controls them, and they have to assimilate and embody

the “positive” attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of white people.

We see that in the essay when Baldwin describes a “custom” the villagers have of buying

African Natives for the purpose of converting them to Christianity. He also states his father's

experience with Catholic baptism when he accepted the “white salvation.”

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I tried not to think of these so lately baptized kinsmen, of the price paid for them, or the
peculiar price they themselves would pay, and said nothing about my father, who having
taken his own conversion too literally never, at bottom, forgave the white world (which
he described as heathen) for having saddled him with a Christ in whom, to judge at least
from their treatment of him, they themselves no longer believed. (Baldwin, 44)

The concept of inequity and the power of white over black it’s also found in “Playing in

the dark” By Toni Morrison; the author states that the power is heavily influenced by the way the

whites imagined their roles in the world, and that imagination is reflected in the literature,

intensifying the focus on being on top, and it controls the social hierarchies. This idea relates to

our analysis of Baldwin’s essay “every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the

root function of language is to control the universe by describing it3”.

There is a conflict between interracial relationships and cultural identity that still echoes

in our society. Baldwins, with his inevitable reflection on the racial problem in the United States,

helps us better understand and contextualize our cultural questions. If the white man can not

return to his desired naivete, the black man cannot continue to be seen as despised on the

fringes of democracy. There was an ongoing march impossible to ignore, and whoever tried to

do so ran the risk of becoming a “monster” because insistence is also a form of disfigurement. It

was necessary, once and for all, to recognize that the world is interracial e multicultural. But

Baldwin would not live long enough to see how far this insistence would go.
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Bibliography

“Stranger in the village: James Baldwin”. 43-49. Harper’s Magazine Press, 1953

“Playing in the dark, Whiteness and the literary imagination: Toni Morrison”. Press, 1992