A light rain fell. Were he alive, he would be turning ninety. To be a stranger is to be looked at, but to be black is to be looked at especially. Once we understand that, we can then recognize problematic statements and attitudes such as:At the end of the day, being an advocate for workplace equity requires compassion, curiosity, and continual introspection. Black Is the Body marks the debut of an essayist in command of her gifts, a book that belongs beside the best of contemporary autobiography." But within that larger distress was a set of linked stories, and thinking about “Stranger in the Village,” thinking with its help, was like injecting a contrast dye into my encounter with the news. The moral ledger remains so far in the negative that we can’t even get started on the question of reparations.
Bach, so profoundly human, is my heritage. What he loves does not love him in return.This is where I part ways with Baldwin. There are glances all over Europe and in India, and anywhere I go outside Africa. The body was not abandoned for the mind’s sake: Alvin Ailey, Arthur Ashe, and Michael Jordan happened, too. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. And, yes, when James Baldwin died in 1987, he, too, was recognized as an all-star.Thinking further about the cathedral at Chartres, about the greatness of that achievement and about how, in his view, it included blacks only in the negative, as devils, Baldwin writes that “the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past.” But the distant African past has also become much more available than it was in 1953. The ancestor had briefly taken possession of the descendant. Of the villagers, he writes:These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. We arrived thirty minutes after leaving that town, which was called Leuk.
Throughout the culture, there are imitations of the gait, bearing, and dress of the black body, a vampiric “everything but the burden” co-option of black life. But Happersberger, who was an experienced climber, reached out a hand, and Baldwin was saved. Book Club Discussion Questions Our 3,500 Reading Guides include Discussion Questions, Book Reviews, Author Bios, and Plot Summaries.. Use the SEARCH box (title or author) If you don't find a specific guide for a book, take a look at our Discussion Tips & Ideas.. And remember to … Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter.Photograph by Ted Thai/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty It’s ok to admit you’re not yet comfortable with the concept of intersectionality.
He was a stranger in Leukerbad, Baldwin wrote, but there was no possibility for blacks to be strangers in the United States, nor for whites to achieve the fantasy of an all-white America purged of blacks. I listened to some of the same music while I was there, as a way of being with him: Bessie Smith singing “I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl” (“I need a little sugar in my bowl / I need a little hot dog on my roll”), Fats Waller singing “Your Feet’s Too Big.” I listened to my own playlist as well: Bettye Swann, Billie Holiday, Jean Wells, “Coltrane Plays the Blues,” the Physics, Childish Gambino. I ran a hot bath and lay neck-deep in the water with my old paperback copy of “Notes of a Native Son.” The tinny sound from my laptop was Bessie Smith singing “I’m Wild About That Thing,” a filthy blues number and a masterpiece of plausible deniability: “Don’t hold it baby when I cry / Give me every bit of it, else I’d die / I’m wild about that thing.” She could be singing about a trombone. Because systems of oppression all overlap and their effects are compounded. There were a few glances at the hotel when I was checking in, and in the fine restaurant just up the road, but there are always glances. The train to Leuk had come in from Visp, the train from Visp had come from Bern, and the train before that was from Zurich, from which I had started out in the afternoon. I care for them more than some white people do, just as some white people care more for aspects of African art than I do.
Through this landscape—craggy, bare in places and verdant elsewhere, a textbook instance of the sublime—one moves as though through a dream. It takes a while to understand that this disposability continues. NEW YORK, NY - JULY 07: Activists protest in Times Square in response to the recent fatal shootings of two black men by police, July 7, 2016 in New York City. Thou canst do strange things, but thou turnest them to little account!—To conceive of this effort of extraordinary dexterity distracts the imagination and makes admiration breathless.” In the presence of the admirable, some are breathless not with admiration but with rage. D&I is also an invitation to hear and learn more about others’ experiences and systematically examine the workings of our society, even if it feels pretty uncomfortable sometimes. They object to the presence of the black body (an unarmed boy in a street, a man buying a toy, a dancer in the subway, a bystander) as much as they object to the presence of the black mind. This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history. And so Baldwin, who was depressed and distracted at the time, went, and the village (which is also called Loèche-les-Bains) proved to be a refuge for him. Nor can I see how they could be anything else, since we are people who are involved in the texture of the American experience.” And yet I (born in the United States more than half a century after Baldwin) continue to understand, because I have experienced in my own body the undimmed fury he felt about pervasive, limiting racism.
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