Rereading: Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
Fifty years after John Howard Griffin darkened his skin and travelled through the segregated US south, his record of the fear and prejudice he experienced is still resonant
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One day in 1964 John Howard Griffin, a 44-year-old Texan journalist and novelist, was standing by the side of the road in Mississippi with a flat tyre. He saw a group of men approaching him. Griffin assumed the men were heading over to assist him but instead they dragged him away from his car and proceeded to beat him violently with chains before leaving him for dead. It took Griffin five months to recover from the assault. The attack was not random; the beating represented a particularly brutal form of literary criticism: Griffin was being punished for having written a book. Black Like Me, the book in question, had been published three years earlier in November 1961 and it had led to its author being both venerated and vilified. Griffin, a lantern-jawed and chestnut-haired white man, deliberately darkened his skin and spent six weeks travelling through the harshly segregated southern states of America, revisiting cities he knew intimately, in the guise of a black man. On the opening page Griffin set out the question he was attempting to answer: "What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin colour, something over which one has no control?" No white man could, he reasoned, truly understand what it was like to be black, because black people would never tell the truth to outsiders. "The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us was to become a Negro," Griffin writes. "I decided I would do this."
He visits a dermatologist who prescribes medication usually given to victims of vitiligo (a disease that causes white spots to appear on the patient's skin) and he supplements the medication with sessions under a sun-lamp and by shaving his hair and rubbing a stain into his skin. In one of the most powerful passages in the book Griffin describes the shock of seeing his new self in the mirror for the first time. "In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger," he writes, "a fierce, bald, very dark Negro glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me … I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I had no kinship … I looked into the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the white John Griffin's past. No, the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness."
Startled by how little of himself he recognises, Griffin sets off on his journey and is further shocked by how little he recognises of his own country: the man who shines his shoes every day does not recognise him, the restaurants he usually eats in are no longer open to him, and he has to plan ahead if he wants to use the bathroom or drink from a water fountain. White folks either treat him with extravagant politeness – when they are on the hunt for black girls or they want to inquire about his sex life – or they give him what Griffin describes as "the hate stare". "Nothing can describe the withering horror of this," he writes, "you feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it terrifies you. I felt like saying 'What in God's name are you doing to yourself?'" Being exposed to the hate stare, witnessing racism from the other side, leaves Griffin sad and angry; he grieves at how "my own people could give the hate stare, could shrivel men's souls, could deprive humans of rights they unhesitatingly accord their livestock". He concludes that "the Negro is treated not even as a second-class citizen but as a tenth-class one."
Griffin's outrage at this injustice was rooted in his own life. He was studying in France at the outbreak of the second world war and joined the French resistance, helping to smuggle Jewish children to Britain. Having witnessed the consequences of racism against Jews he became more sensitive to the plight of black people in America. Griffin had been temporarily blinded during the war after being blasted with shrapnel. He recovered his sight two years before embarking on the journey he described in Black Like Me, and the book can be read as a reaction to the lessons he learnt while sightless. "The blind," he would later write, "can only see the heart and intelligence of a man, and nothing in these things indicates in the slightest whether a man is white or black."
Black Like Me was Griffin's effort to persuade America to open its eyes. The first extracts from the book were published by Sepia magazine, and immediately he found himself the target of hostile attention. He received death threats, and an effigy of him was hung in Dallas, his home town, prompting Griffin and his family to go into exile in Mexico, where he did further work on the book. When it was published, he criss-crossed the country delivering lectures on his experiences; Black Like Me was translated into 14 languages, sold more than 10m copies, was adapted into a film and is still taught in schools and colleges across the US.
Read More http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/27/black-like-me-john-howard-griffin
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I posted about this before. It NEEDS to be read again today. Black Like Me. Take a walk in their shoes.
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From my post a year ago
John Howard Griffin, left in New Orleans in 1959, asked what "adjustments" a white man would have to make if he were black. (Don Rutledge)
As the civil rights movement accelerated, Griffin gave more than a thousand lectures and befriended black spokesmen ranging from Dick Gregory to Martin Luther King Jr. Notorious throughout the South, he was trailed by cops and targeted by Ku Klux Klansmen, who brutally beat him one night on a dark road in 1964, leaving him for dead. By the late 1960s, however, the civil rights movement and rioting in Northern cities highlighted the national scale of racial injustice and overshadowed Griffin’s experiment in the South. Black Like Me, said activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), “is an excellent book—for whites.” Griffin agreed; he eventually curtailed his lecturing on the book, finding it “absurd for a white man to presume to speak for black people when they have superlative voices of their own.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/black-like-me-50-years-later-74543463/#ixzz2ulJcEouv
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024587316
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..I love my parents for teaching me to see what's inside a person....any person. 
