Baldwin states that his reason for traveling to this village is because he felt alienated by the racial climate in America. The village that he traveled to had the population of "six hundred people living there and all of them were Catholic" (Baldwin). When Baldwin arrived at the village, he demonstrated the ideologies of how white people in Europe viewed black people. Baldwin talks about feeling like a rarity and an attraction, being called the n-word, and he shares his theory of how evolved the world will become.
In the essay "Stranger in the Village," Baldwin expresses his feelings of loneliness and being out of place in a tiny Swiss village, and compares it to black men's general feelings of being a stranger in an unfamiliar world created by white men. Baldwin explains that a white man can never feel like a stranger wherever he goes, because of his advantage of the assumed distinction and position as an example of authority. Baldwin makes a connection between the Swiss village and white America through their shared ideologies and influence. Baldwin writes, "America comes out of Europe, but these people have never seen America. Yet they move with an authority which I shall never have; and they regard me, quite rightly, not only as a stranger in their village but as a suspect late-comer and they 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" (Baldwin 167).
Baldwin's position is that whites are able to maintain their reputation regardless of their location in the world. Baldwin lectures that black people are strangers in the white man's world. Despite the location, this principle will forever remain the same, whether it is the little Swiss village or a big American city. In both places, black people will be considered to be both an exotic rarity and an abnormality.