Sample Essay On Reading Response To The Writing

<Student Name>
<Name and Section # of course>
<Instructor Name>

A Stranger in the Village is James Baldwin’s most decisive essay about the racial and ethnic issues that surround the world specifically the Western world, where people of his race are treated with much contempt and discrimination. The essay is written as a travelogue rather than a narrative, yet it tells tales that run deep through time and the writer constantly shifts between the present and the past. Baldwin begins by describing how the people of a Swiss village that he went to treat him. The racial bias was much obvious to him, and he tried his best to adjust with and become one with the people. According to him, no other ‘black man’ had ever ventured into this tiny village before him which is why he was a spectacle for all eyes, young and old. The only real attraction in the village is the hot spring in the summer which is a tourist attraction; apart from that the other distraction in this village is he, who is mused over my all who come across him.
Baldwin feels himself now getting accustomed to being called ‘Neger’ by the children of this village, some who cower away from him because they have been told something notorious about black people and others feel no shame at pointing to and noticing him. The women he sees look down and away, smirking at his existence in their village and that makes him realize he will never be one of the crowds. He usually comes to the village to write which is his occupation, and he is drawn to this place because of the people and the isolation of this from the rest of the country.
Baldwin illustrates that it was a custom of this village to buy slaves and convert them to Christianity. This is just another form of slavery that is depicted by these white people. The white race will maintain its supremacy over the black race no matter what the odds and what the circumstances. Every year he will return to this village and watch how other African natives are treated as inferiors by these natives and nothing changes as the years go by.
For the rest of the essay, Baldwin gives an account of the issue of slavery that is still a part of the world. The color of the skin makes one so distinguished so much so that if the white man who went to Africa, being with a different skin and looking for the odd one out was still treated with respect, considered a conqueror and man of dignity and simultaneously a colored man arriving in a land of white men and women would be looked down upon and the lingering hatred and contempt could be blatantly felt by that person. The writer emphasizes the fact that although the time passes and moves on, people are still stuck in history, “People are trapped in history and history in them.” He says that the Americans try to come to terms with the past and their behavior with the blacks it just an attempt to hide and cover what their ancestors did in the past, however, they cannot do so completely. According to him, the biggest folly of these Americans is to think that their civilization is the most superior and the past civilizations were only secondary to build the superstructure of their own civilization. This then brings the idea of white supremacy where to merge with and accept the black man as one of their own society would be equated with endangering their own superiority, yet if they don’t then their notions of democracy and the New World would also be up to questions. The entire concept of white/black racial discrimination has now evolved into something more complex, where not only has the colored race been highlighted, but also the white race has been shown a new visage.