Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Beyond the Eyes of the Beholder

It was 1964. A social psychologist named Robert Rosenthal decided to test whether or not teachers’ expectations had an effect on students’ performance. This experiment was carried out at a San Francisco elementary school, where students were all given an assessment exam at the beginning of the school year. Teachers were made to believe that some students, or the “bloomers”, were more destined for academic success when in fact they were all chosen at random. When the students took the same exam a year later, the results showed that the “bloomers” showed a more dramatic improvement in academic performance, as compared to the control group. The results of their research is now known as the “Pygmalion Effect”- the phenomenon that explains how higher expectations lead to an increase in performance. The reverse is true as well. Fundamentally, the “bloomers” and the control group only differed in the teachers’ minds. Although unconscious, the teachers’ negative bias toward the non-bloomers became the control group’s reality, regardless of the students’ actual capabilities.

However, this self-fulfilling prophecy transcends education. The transatlantic slave trade was the cornerstone of white supremacy. For centuries, African-American slaves were considered as property and did not possess even the most basic forms of human rights. The exploitation of the enslaved individuals was justified by one simple reason— they were black. The Civil War may have brought an end to slavery, but the social battle against racism goes far beyond the transformation of white people. The abominable acts of oppression generations of African-Americans were subjected to became a core part of their identity. To put Rosenthal’s experiment into context, imagine if the students were actually conscious of the false bias. The gap between the “bloomers” and the control group would have been more dramatic. Institutional racism made sure that the African-Americans internalized the oppression, and they did.

James Baldwin deconstructs the complex relationship between racism and internalized racism in “Stranger in the Village”. This powerful essay follows the African-American author into a remote village in Switzerland and vividly details the experience of being the first black visitor in an all-white community. He describes the remote Swiss village, Leukerbad, as a “white wilderness” that was “absolutely forbidding” and “virtually unknown” (Baldwin 80). Its distance from civilization makes it a less advanced society that cannot easily access normal institutions like banks, libraries and theatres. Furthermore, Baldwin learns that he is the first black man to ever step foot in Leukerbad and none of the villagers have actually seen a person of his color before.

His description of the village highlights two things: the village’s remoteness and the villagers’ disconnect with modern society. This physical and social distance accounts for the old-fashioned village’s closed and ignorant mindset. It was as if the entire village was frozen in history. Since Baldwin’s essay was published in the midst of the American Civil Rights Movement, Leukerbad seemed to delineate a more archaic and sinister form of racism— an idea Baldwin continuously draws from throughout the essay.

The first thing Baldwin grappled with was his hypervisibility. In the eyes of the villagers, Baldwin’s physical characteristics made him a “living wonder” (Baldwin 81). It is one thing to be constantly watched, but observations are normally followed by judgements. The author’s hypervisibility as a black man made him uncomfortable and insists that “the white man cease to regard him as an exotic rarity and recognize him as a human being” (Baldwin 84). In a way, it is his own hypervisibility that made Baldwin feel invisible.

Ralph Ellison manages to personify this concept of invisibility in his book, “Invisible Man”. In the prologue, the novel’s protagonist introduces himself as an invisible man that is neither a ghost nor a man with transparent features. Instead, he maintains that his invisibility is “simply because people refuse to see [him]” (Ellison 1). He blames his invisibility on “a peculiar disposition” of those he encounters, describing their faults as “a matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality” (Ellison 1). To others, he is simply not real. At one point, Ellison’s invisible man even goes as far as to attacking people on the streets to feel visible. He takes it upon himself to exist through the light that he steals from a power company. He uses this to power a basement he completely fills with lightbulbs; whose lights make him feel “seen”.

Baldwin felt the same lack of identity in Leukerbad. His African-American identity, at least, did not exist in the Swiss village. The villagers refuse to acknowledge his American identity simply because they are convinced that “black men come from Africa” (Baldwin 80). The blatant ignorance does not stop there. The villagers rarely addressed Baldwin by his name. Instead, they openly called him “Neger” (Baldwin 80) which, to an extent, is considered a public taboo in America. Just like the invisible man, he was a black man without an identity, and Baldwin realizes that “the black man, as a man, did not exist for Europe” (Baldwin 86-87).

The outrageous social environment renders Baldwin dumbfounded with internal responses ranging “astonishment, curiosity, amusement and outrage” (80). However, he understands that “all the physical characteristics of the Negro which had caused [him], in America, a very different and almost forgotten pain were nothing less than miraculous-or infernal-in the eyes of the village people” (Baldwin 81). He even goes as far as to defend the villagers who “did not mean to be unkind” (Baldwin 81) and whose lack of awareness cannot be held against them. It is through the Leukerbad’s ignorant innocence that Baldwin comes to recognizes the true uniqueness of his African-American heritage.

He asserts that “Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world” (89) in a way that “it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. But not so to accept him was to deny his human reality” (Baldwin 88). While white supremacy was still very much present in both continents, Baldwin felt more human in America. He argues that, “… in America, even as a slave, he was an inescapable part of the general social fabric and no American could escape having an attitude toward him. Americans attempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro, but the very nature of these abstractions reveals the tremendous effects the presence