What's Baldwin's intent of writing this essay:
Baldwin talks about how different the Europeans and Americans sees him as a black man. In a way he is sort of saying how Europeans are naive about what's going on with the racial issue in the US. I think Baldwin's intention of writing this essay was to criticize how white men treat the African Americans in the US. He was reinforcing how racial justice issue has always been a huge part of the history in earlier years. Yet, there was nothing the African Americans can do about these racial injustice problems.
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The whole paragraph 14: "There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born, between the children who shout Neger! today and those who shouted Nigger! yesterday—the abyss is experience, the American experience. The syllable hurled behind me today expresses, above all, wonder: I am a stranger here. But I am not a stranger in America and the same syllable riding on the American air expresses the war my presence has occasioned in the American soul." explains that there is a difference between how people view him as a black man in this small European town and back in America. When a Swiss village kid called him Negger from the back, he didn't really feel anguish at all, but it certainly reminded him of how he was treated in America.
Paragraph 10 says "The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable: this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever."--- this supports how Baldwin feels in America. There is nothing he can do about the situation, but being hurt and furious.
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4 comments:
You picked two of my favorite paragraphs. :D
Yeah, I think the racial issue in America was definitely an important point. This is kind of beside the point, but I wonder what the narrator's reason was to travel to the village...
This was really good. I liked how you mentioned that Baldwin may be saying that Europeans are naive about racial issues.
I agree about how he wrote this to criticize the treatment of blacks by Americans. And also how he feels like he can't do anything... "The rage of the disesteemed is fruitless." (I may have paraphrased?) I think he might be expressing his frustration with his situation, and in a way, hoping that Americans will learn that it is time for change.
Very good, I thought that you're supporting quotations were well chosen to augment your central point. I thought that your main idea about European naivity and the difference between Europeans and Americans was also accurate.
See, it totally shocks me when you even question whether you should be in AP, when you provide responses like that. Excellent reading of the text. I think your first sentence about how Europeans and Americans see black people differently based on Europe's lack of knowledge about racial circumstances in America is so insightful. Very nice job.
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