quasar's Full Review: John Howard Griffin and Robert (AFT) Bonazzi - Bla...
I'm no stranger to prejudice. I've lived in a place where I was singled out, ostracized for no other reason than my religion, something that I was born with. I've been spat at, refused admittance into people's homes, kicked out of or not allowed entry into clubs and teams, physically injured, and called every bad name in the book. I know how it feels to be not good enough even if that's a lie, to be denied opportunities that should have been freely available, to have evidence manufactured that justifies every ignorant remark and unfair action. I know what it's like.
But all of this was done at best semi-openly, under the covers of legal protections and with some attempt to adhere to the letter of the law that supposedly makes people color blind and required to discount religion. I never encountered a sign that said "No Jews Allowed" and whenever I complained there was at least some attempt to pretend to look into matters. No one ever did, of course, or they came up with some really silly excuse why the behavior I mentioned was acceptable, but on the surface they pretended. They had to pretend. It was the law.
We didn't always have civil rights laws to force the prejudice underground. In fact, these laws are a fairly recent development. Less than 40 years ago it was perfectly legal to refuse service based on skin color or religion or sexual orientation or any number of other superficial reasons. Bathrooms were segregated, schools were segregated, restaurants and hotels were segregated. I know this to be true, but I have a hard time comprehending it.
Even if I could comprehend it, I still wouldn't have any sense of what it was really like. Oh, I can imagine, and based on my own personal experience I could probably do so with more accuracy than most. But I can't know.
White writer John Howard Griffin decided he had to know. So he chemically altered his skin color, added some stain to help the effect, shaved his head, and became a black man in the deep south. Black Like Me is the story of his journey through New Orleans, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama as a black man.
Written as a series of dated journal entries, Black Like Me provides surprisingly little insight into why Griffin decided he had to do something so radical nor does it provide any real sense of what his family and friends thought of the idea other than a general sense of support. It is a detailed but fairly unemotional recounting of the steps he took to turn from white to black, his life as a black man, and the media attention he got after his experience became known.
This recounting was interesting, but in many ways it left me cold. I was expecting more. Much more. That his new life was radically different from the old came through with crystal clarity but other than a few sections near the beginning of the transformation and his feelings on returning to the white community, Griffin remained dispassionate. To me, this was a story that demanded more, demanded a constant sharing of feelings and thoughts. Life is more than the sum of the events that happen to us, it is also our reactions and feelings. By mainly reporting the events Griffin denied us a true picture of what his life was like during his journey.
The most fascinating part of the book was how it highlighted the differences in attitude and conditions in different areas of the South. New Orleans was fairly tolerant. Mississippi harshly intolerant to the point that even casually glancing at a poster with a white woman on it could get a black man into trouble. Montgomery was already energized and somewhat unified under Martin Luther King, Jr. I know I have a tendency to lump "the South" together, particularly when it comes to civil rights, but there really were wide differences in the lifestyle of blacks in different parts of the south. I found that fascinating.
Although there is a fair amount of space dedicated to Griffin's return to his normal life and his subsequent round of talk shows, I again was reading a dispassionate accounting of the events and not getting any true sense of the reaction people had to his extraordinary trip. There was some mention of a few threats against his parents and fear of going into town, but very little more. Again I wanted more.
I had some other problems with the book. It almost seems Griffin took his actual journal kept during his experiment and published it with little editing. There are references to past events of his life that aren't explained in any way. For instance, as he first walks the streets of New Orleans he casually states these were the same streets that he walked as a blind man trying to learn how to use a cane. It's obvious that Griffin can see throughout the events covered by the book and that short discussion of seeing an area you previously only heard and smelled, coming solely in one journal entry, is out of place. It seemed an appropriate thing to have in a private journal Griffin might use to collect his personal thoughts for his later review, but should have been edited out of the public version.
Griffin also didn't quite see through his mission to the bloody end. He balked at the way he was treated in Mississippi and reverted to contacting his white friends. Although the descriptions of his feelings of strangeness and inappropriateness of being in a car with a white man and in being invited into his home were among the few bits of the book that really conveyed what life was like emotionally, his failure to be black and live black throughout the worst that the south has to offer was a big failure in my mind. He also later discovered a way to go back and forth between white and black skin semi-regularly and took excursions into the white world during his last few weeks of living as a black man. It's not my job to judge what was too much to take for a man who discovered a way out out from a rather unpleasant situation. I imagine most folks would escape from the world Griffin had invaded if they could. But having made the decision to live as a black man for a few months, I just couldn't respect his later decision to skirt the lines between the black and white communities.
Black Like Me is definitely worth reading if for nothing more than a historical accounting of the way blacks were treated in the deep south in the late 1950s. However, I feel it should have been so much more. By choosing mostly dispassionate observation and recording of events, Griffin missed the opportunity to really provide a well-rounded account of life as a black man from the perspective of an outsider. By not really discussing why he decided to become a black man, Griffin deprived us of motivation and background information that might have helped us understand his reports more fully. By not delving into the reaction to his unique journey, Griffin chose not to look at the issues of racism and societal interactions on an even larger scale than just his personal interactions. I felt all of those "could have beens" strongly when reading this book. Read it yourself and see if you agree.
The author tells of his experiences after he darkened his skin and traveled through the South in order to find out how it feels to be black.More at HotBookSale
In 1959, Griffin--a white man--headed to New Orleans, darkened his skin, and immersed himself in black society. He then traveled through several state...More at Buy.com
The author tells of his experiences after he darkened his skin and traveled through the South in order to find out how it feels to be black.More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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