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James BaldwinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” was first published in The Reporter, June 6, 1950, as “The Negro in Paris.” Baldwin writes about the experience of an American Black person in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He begins by noting that Black entertainers have a more difficult time becoming successful in Paris than was the case in the 1920s. It seems times have changed: the Black American is no longer a novelty; and post-war Europe is decidedly more of a struggle for everyone. He then notes that only Black entertainers can achieve comradeship with other Black people in Paris. Their non-performing Black countrymen, by comparison, are deliberately isolated. In one sense, the wariness with which Black people regard each other is an extension of the wariness with which he regards all Americans. In another sense, they are trying to escape the segregationist American stereotype that Black people are only happy when they are kept together.
Baldwin observes that Black and White Americans encountering each other in Paris both regard each other through the same distortions created by a lifetime of conditioning. The White American is intimidated to find a Black countryman in Paris; the Black American has learned to avoid any discussion of the past, which includes the current state of affairs in America. The European’s encounter with the Black American, according to Baldwin, is less fraught with history, and the European thus feels free to question Black Americans about it. This leads to another iteration of the same old battle: the European regards the Black American as a victim, and they must therefore struggle anew to salvage identity.
Baldwin comes in the end of the essay to the relationship between the Black American and French Africans who have come to Paris from France’s overseas colonies. Baldwin finds that it is in relation to the African that the Black American realizes they are indeed, irredeemably, American. While they share similarities in terms of poverty and anger (at Europe, in the case of the African), the African has not lost all sense of themselves and their past. There is a home to be reclaimed and liberated. The absence of this touchstone for the Black American creates a unique kind of rudderlessness.
The exact reference of the subtitle “black meets brown” is not spelled out, but it presumably refers to the encounter between the African and the Black American. It is unclear if Baldwin means that the African is Black in relation to the Black American’s brown, perhaps in deference to the true African’s authenticity. Perhaps it is because Africa, as the source for the Diaspora, is also the source of a Black culture that is not diluted by its distance from the motherland. Or, maybe the African is Black because Africa is perceived, even by Black Americans, as primitive. Whatever the intended meaning, Baldwin has addressed himself to the crux of the matter: the inescapable fact that the Middle Passage and enslavement stole everything. And that Black Americans have had to recreate themselves, their culture, and even their history, while they continue to fight off the onslaught of racist violence.
When Baldwin cites the Black spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” he references the methodology of racial slavery wherein parents have no rights to parent their offspring, and children have no rights to be parented, in either the blood family sense or in the social sense. This violence is alienation of the most profound order—it means one is alienated from one’s own birthright as a human being. Alienated from birth means a ruptured lineage, where neither ancestors nor descendants can claim you. Baldwin is suggesting that the contemporary Black American’s longing for Africa and African culture is therefore, in part, an escape from the difficult and painful reality of being American. Baldwin is saying that coming to terms with this, and all that it entails, will be, finally, the beginning of a distinctly Black peace.
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