Artwork: Rashid Johnson. Untitled Beach Collage, 2017, Vinyl, spray enamel, oil stick, black soap, and wax. 183 x 244 x 5 cm / 72 x 96 1/8 x 2 in.
In 1953, James Baldwin published the essay “Stranger in the Village” in Harper’s magazine in which he recounted the culture shock of life as a young African-American man in a small village in Switzerland. The people he encountered were distinctly provincial to the point that manners and etiquette were the least of their concerns. They did not welcome Baldwin so much as the openly gawked, so caught up as they were in the physicality of race.
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“…it must be conceded there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there were certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder,” Baldwin writes, perfectly summarizing the power that cognitive dissonance has over the mind that has lost self-control.
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Grace is more than a virtue, it is an act of dignity; to be able to perceive the experience of the other is to understand the role one has to play. To disregard this, whether out of lack of care or awareness, creates a visceral sense of alienation, codifying the outsider as strange: a stranger.
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Most people are conscientious of their otherness when they step outside their comfort zones; it is only those who are extremely extroverted or self-involved who escape the feeling of not belonging to that which is not theirs by birthright.
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