Baldwin In A Microcosm :: essays research papers

Baldwin in a microcosm"Not everything that is faced brook be changedbut nothing can be changed until it is faced."- James Baldwin      racism has been a part of American and world history for centuries, and has become a pattern in cultures. James Baldwin was an African-American author who, like umpteen black men and women, struggled against the inherent hate/racism in America. Baldwin had the probability to travel to a microcosmic Swiss closure atop a mountain. His story of the natives curiosity towards him and eventually fondness challenges the idea that racism is rapidly overtaking the world. A microcosm, by definition is a representation of something on a smaller scale. In the Renaissance age, philosophers considered the world to be a macrocosm hosting millions of individual microcosms people. The term microcosm signifies the creation of the human being as a complete world. In contrast, macrocosm refers to the idea of the whole cosmos outside human ity. This idea that an individual person is a world unto himself, sure influenced Baldwin in the writing of his essay pertaining to the small Swiss village that was " most unknown" (124).The village that Baldwin verbosely writes about is not specified although he tells us that the warm springs are a tourist draw and that the village is "only four hours from Milan and three hours from Lausanne" (124), but this gives the reader little cultivation about the city. The imagery that forms while reading the passage comes directly from the state of the village. The men, women, and children, are all astounded by Baldwins skin color and bull texture. Some of the inhabitants believed that Baldwins hair "was the color of tar, that it had the texture of wire, or the texture of cotton wool" (125). The sheer astonishment of the village natives took Baldwin by surprise, as did the young children yelling "Neger Neger" The people of the town, although geographical ly sheltered, are the same people that Baldwin knew as he grew up. He says that "America comes out of Europe, but these people have neer seen America, nor have most of them seen more of Europe than the hamlet at the pedestal of their mountain" (127). Baldwin grew up in Harlem and suffered from racism in many ways. He recalls be called the very same derogatory word that the children in the Swiss village called him, but the difference was that the children in Harlem had an inbred racism and the Swiss children had never seen a black man before.