I recently read the book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. He was a journalist, and in his book, he recounts his personal experiences that occurred in late 1959 when he took pills to darken his pigmentation so he would appear African-American. He did this in order to fully understand what it is like for African Americans who faced intense racism and segregation. After making the transformation from white to black, he traveled to various cities in the South, the strongholds of racist ideology, and lived as a black man, all the while being personally persecuted by whites because of his color, and also fellowshipping with blacks and learning more about their challenges in a country dominated by whites.
Not only did his experiences reveal to him just how hateful white people could be towards blacks, but it also revealed to himself that he too had racism within him. Obviously, for a white man to undertake an endeavor such as he did, he was compassionate and concerned about blacks in America, but when he first saw himself in the mirror as a black man, he didn’t like the man that he saw. For him, this revealed that although he was willing and wanting to live integrated with Blacks, that underneath all his inclinations towards justice, he did posess the belief that, in and of themselves, whites were simply superior to Blacks. Griffin was disgusted by this racism he found in himself, but at least now able to confront it and combat it with truth.
After Griffin told his story and had many TV and newspaper interviews, he was treated with much hatred by some white racists. What’s interesting is how his experience as a black man continued to be relevant in the Civil Rights Movement. White leaders looking for social reform would often call on him so he could relay to them the black perspective on social and political matters. He found that he could speak truth about the racism and injustices to these white people, but if it were a black man saying the same things the whites would not have allowed themselves to hear or receive what was being communicated. For this reason, he played a pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement: the black people trusted him because of what he had done, and the white people trusted him because he was white. Therefore, he was a bridge in a time before whites were ready to sit down together with blacks and talk out the issues.
I highly recommend this book. It challenges its reader to examine their own prejudices and stereotypes. In addition, as a white reader, I felt like it really helped me to understand some of the challenges that African- Americans have faced and continue to face in this country.
The title, Black Like Me, comes from a poem written by the famous African-American poet, Langston Hughes. The poem is titled “Dream Variation.” (Read the poem)
I’ll end with a quote from Griffin’s book. Soon after his transformation into a black man, he “learned within a very few hours that no one was judging me by my qualities as a human individual and everyone was judging me by my pigment. As soon as white men or women saw me, they automatically assumed I possessed a whole set of false characteristics (false not only to me but to all black men). They could not see me or any other black man as a human individual because they buried us under the garbage of their stereotyped view of us.”
