Strangers and Outsiders.

My last trip in 2008, to Europe, opened my eyes to a reality I had never considered about my identity in the United States. I don’t suppose it’s impossible to arrive at this reality without leaving the states, but I do think doing so, especially for a trip to Europe, accentuates the understanding of it. It is a reality that very few Americans arrive at in their lives, and if they do realize it, keep themselves at a periphery of it, for this reality has very stark and real connotations for the identity they’ve been ascribed in their country.

Arriving in Europe, I thought of myself as an American in Europe. This, after all, is what my passport said and how many in Europe would likely see me upon first encounter. I spoke with an American-English accent, knew little to nothing about the area, and would have to dig back multiple generations to find a direct descendent from this part of the world. I was, indeed, and am a stranger to the continent.

I went through my first several days wrapped up in the excitement of being in England, taking with locals and sharing with them any information they wanted to know about me. It wasn’t until I arrived in France, walking amongst the sea of people in Paris, that I arrived at one of the biggest realities of my young adult life.

I stepped off of a bus to take my picture, like everyone else, in front of the Eiffel Tower. When I was heading back towards the bus, a couple of men approached me selling mini-Eiffel towers, 5 for a dollar (equivalent). It is useful for this essay to note that the men were of Sub-Saharan African origin, or black. That, however, is not the reality I arrived at. It was their general approach and attitude in dealing with me that caused the change. Of the three of us, it seemed as if I was the only one acting as if there were even a hint of tension. Let me note that I’ve never been into a fight with a black person, never been the victim of a crime by the hands of a black person, and have generally gotten along with black people in my life. By tension, also, let me clarify that I did not get tense physically, but sensed a tension from myself, as well as a distance, neither of which did I get from these two men. In their interactions with others, I noticed that the European onlookers that were approached seemed to wave them off as they would any white tourist or European stranger.

It was here that I realized what James Baldwin had written about in his essay ‘Stranger in the Village’: the white Americans identity is, in some ways or others, undeniably linked with the identity of the black Americans identity. Continental Europeans did not create the black man as a facet of European society for their purposes, no more than they created the concept of a European. White Americans created the Black American for specific purposes. But it was here that I noticed a bigger reality, Americans created the White people for an entirely different set of, but equally as important, reasons.

White Americans depended on the subjugation of the Black Americans for so long and in such a diverse number of ways that their very identity became intertwined as such. It is in understanding this that one understands the actions of white people in the overturning of those paradigms in the past and present. If Black Americans as the subjugated class were the creation of White Americans for the purposes to protect themselves from the darkness (no pun intended) and impossibility of salvation of the Black man, then White identity would therefore be shaken, disfigured, and redefined when Black people were freed, integrated, and granted equal opportunity. White people needed Black people to remain below them to feel like they had an identity. It is in understanding this that one sees the desperation in the faces, voices, and rhetoric of so many right-wing attacks on Barack Obama. Behind the vitriolic attacks of 2008 were not just anti-leftist words. These words paled in comparison to John Kerry, an equally as liberal candidate of 2004. Beyond the surface of these words lied the slipping away of white identity in the U.S.

Europeans did not rely on the African to identify themselves. And if they did, it was in a colonial sense that could be easily made abstract and replaced by their regional identification. As Baldwin remarks, gone were the days of the European in America setting eyes on the African as a stranger or familiar outsider. Europeans in America were replaced in identity as Whites, and the outsider African became the Black person they were dependent upon in identity.

It is this distinction, not some gap in genealogical history, which sets White Americans from Europeans in the context of identity. The White man needs the Black man as a subjugated person socially to find comfort with himself. Does this mean that Black people must perennially be at the lower end of the totem pole of White people, or that White identity must be removed in order to arrive at a more just social reality?