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Play, download and edit the free video Swiss Press Award 21 Video E Who is afraid of the black man?.

Simon Gabioud
2nd prize

Who is afraidof the black man?
Aired December 26, 2020

Le Temps

In 1951, the African American writer James Baldwin came to the small village of Leuk to write a book in a peaceful setting: “From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came,” he wrote; it’s a cultural shock for the community. Pulling from Baldwin's book Notes of a Native Son as well as archive images, Simon Gabioud tells of the writer’s experiences as an alien. In Baldwin’s words: “The children who shout Neger! have no way of knowing the echoes this sound raises in me.” With the help of analysis from Afro feminist historian Pamela Ohene-Nyako, the film shifts between the present and the past. How much has changed in 70 years? “These (white) people 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. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, [...]” Baldwin wrote in 1951. In the historian’s opinion, nothing has changed to this day: “White privilege still exists. It is a fact that a white person never thinks they are restricted because they are white.”

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