John Howard Griffin (1920–1980)

Black Like Me tells the story of a famous social experiment: in 1959, with Jim Crow laws still in effect, a white writer manages to darken his skin and travel throughout the Deep South as a black man. As such he encounters both irrational prejudice and the occasional kindness, but much more of the former than the latter. If Griffin is exactly the same person on the inside, whether his skin is white or black, why should such a superficial characteristic dictate how others treat him?

This show more exposé is a fascinating study in the sociology and psychology of racism. I was surprised at the ease with which Griffin was able to adopt a black persona and wonder why no one saw through his disguise. Although some commenters have called this narrative dated, I found that unfortunately, many of Griffin’s observations (especially regarding the thought processes of white supremacists) still hold true today. show less

This is a non-fiction work detailing the experiences of a middle-aged white man who posed convincingly as a black man in the southern United States, at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Prior to reading this, I'd seen an Oprah episode where a young white man named Josh Solomon who was inspired by this work had tried the same procedure of skin-altering drugs and disguise but didn't last a week. John Griffin, journalist and author, endured a full six weeks in the deep south in 1959. His show more advantage was the full knowledge that his society was blatantly and openly racist. It wasn't his task to determine if racism existed. He was on a mission to experience it, the ultimate walk in another's shoes, and to learn how it can be endured.

The author writes with penetrating insight, doing his best (and admirably so) to frame explanations in addition to relating events. Many of his explanations for the behaviours he witnesses feel spot-on, brilliant, and well backed-up by the examples. There were many quotable discoveries like this for me throughout. I found an enormous amount of clarity shed on the double-edged sword of racism, and on the insults that can be generated by statements a white man might mistakenly view as innocuous. The epilogue paints the story of the 1960s (before my time) more clearly than anything I've read before, leading into the "separation" approach that finally achieved real progress.

I was taken by how consuming Mr. Griffin's new identity was for him, how within just a matter of days it controlled his psyche to the point where he had difficulty framing any thought as a white man would. Picked up by a white friend for a brief escape from his experiment, he writes "I was embarrassed to ride in the front seat of the car with a white man, especially on our way to his home." This was at night with no witnesses, and still he felt this as a result of his new persona and all the oppression that swiftly came with it.

The saddest episodes occurred whenever white people were confronted by their own contradictions and became belligerent or affronted rather than learn anything. Either they sensed the danger in questioning anything that would place them against the white mainstream, or couldn't face recasting their entire lifetime's behaviour in a very bad light.

The events of this book took place just as Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement started rolling. It's a capturing of the world which that movement was trying to change. But however much things have changed since, in many sad respects they remain the same. What most of us see today on the surface is not as obvious as what Mr. Griffin experienced, but (as the young man on Oprah discovered) much still lies beneath. This is a must-read book for confronting and examining these truths. show less

"The negro. The South. These are the details. The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls and bodies of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared and detested. I could have been a Jew in Germany, a Mexican in a number of states, or a member of any "inferior" group. Only the details would have differed. The story would be the same." (from the preface)

White writer darkens his skin and assumes the identity of a black man in the Deep South circa 1959. With an open sensibility and a novelist’s skill, Griffin constructs poignant set pieces, conjures the sights, sounds and smells of a constrained world, and puts a pointed stick to the rotten underbelly of the human condition.

The distance between white and black, writes Griffin, was ‘an area of unknowing.’ The white man could carry on with his life and never give thought to a black man, show more much less consider how he lived and survived, where he ate or where he slept or what his family was like. The black man could not afford to be ignorant of the white man’s ways. The black man’s concern was how to get along with the white man, how to hold his own and raise himself in the esteem of the white man ‘without for a moment letting him think he had any god-given rights that we did not also have.’ For the black man, day-to-day living was a reminder of his inferior status—'the polite rebuffs when he seeks better employment, hearing himself referred to as a coon or jigaboo, having to bypass available restroom facilities or eating facilities to find one specified for him.’

His only salvation from complete despair lies in his belief, the old belief of his forefathers, that these things are not directed at him personally, but against his race, his pigmentation. His mother or aunt long ago prepared him, explaining that he as an individual can live in dignity, even though he as a Negro cannot.

Griffin goes far enough under cover to become attuned to the unspoken signals and gestures and looks of clandestine commiseration among blacks. ‘Geniality among one’s own was a kind of buffer against an invisible but ever-present threat.’ He even occasionally dreams like a black man, of suffocating hatred, of being chased, of being just at the threshold of some terrible danger. He feels his own face has lost expressiveness; his mind ‘dozes empty for long periods, trying to cushion the dread.’

Griffin does not condemn all white people, but he responds with inward surprise at the few he encounters who do not impulsively demean or dismiss him—the lady at the Catholic bookstore who cashes his traveler’s check, or the military officer at the bus station who does not jump ahead of him in the queue. Most revealing of the attitudes and actions of whites is their hypocrisy—the outcries against ‘mongrelization’ along with the sexual violence committed against young black women, the grotesque transformation in the faces of the white women leaving church on Sunday morning when suddenly catching sight of a black man passing on the sidewalk. The black man sees the casual cruelty of bigots in ‘the honorable South,’ the way they take pleasure in causing pain and humiliation, and he hears them say that it is the blacks’ immorality that keeps them from receiving the benefits of freedom, and sometimes he feels pity.

Griffin makes his way from New Orleans to Biloxi to Montgomery, where he is struck by the different atmosphere of a place where blacks have organized nonviolent and prayerful resistance to racial discrimination. Such resistance bewilders and angers the white racist, writes Griffin, ‘because the dignity of the Negro’s course of action emphasizes the indignity of his own.’ The white man needles and taunts and challenges the black man in the hope that he will strike out and so justify further violent repression.

Black Like Me is sometimes hard to read and feel and so cannot be passed through lightly. Griffin lived to tell, and he told it well, his insights precise and evocative of the parochial but also universal, at a time when much of white America had little idea of what he was on about. show less