Black Like Me

Returning to yesterday’s theme of people being in a perfect position for what they end up doing, the best example may be John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me.

I’m sure I must have read something about the book in college, but I had forgotten all about it until I read the article. Now I think I understand a SNL sketch I saw once with Jane Curtin (not the Richard Pryor one; she was the author in this one).

One thing that I found interesting is that Griffin had an extended period of blindness, and had first spent time in New Orleans, his starting point, while blind. So first he was there as a blind man, and then he got to know it again as a sighted white man, and then he got to see it as a black man. It’s an extraordinary thing to experience so many different perspectives, and I think maybe that made him ideal for this project.

Griffin had already demonstrated his courage and commitment to serving others as a medic in the French Resistance, smuggling Austrian Jews to safety. He had already had the experience of being a racial minority and of going in to another culture as the only Caucasian on Nuni (one of the Solomon Islands) for a couple of years while serving in the Army Air Corps. It would appear that his Catholicism was also a helpful factor at the time, because Catholics seem to have been more invested in the Civil Rights movement in the South of that time. Also, he was able to take the Oxsoralen without showing liver damage, which did matter for him being able to complete the experiment.

There were a few things that were surprising for me. One is how much the skin color mattered even for people who knew. The shoeshine man knew, but it was as if he forgot. Howard was now just one of them. Howard knew, and yet he felt alienated from his family, even for telephoning or writing a letter where there would be no visual contact. He felt alienated from himself. Perhaps part of the staying power of racial prejudice is how strong a hold our visual image has on our mental image.

That image is important as it relates to bigotry, but I think it is important in how it relates to other areas too.  It is frightening to think that if something major happens to alter my appearance how hard it will be mentally to adjust, and that’s never having been crazy about my appearance in the first place. Think how it must be for people as they age, but at least that happens gradually. Then think of it in relationship to someone with an eating disorder, or someone who is addicted to plastic surgery, or to piercings or tattoos. Think of burn victims. Those are thoughts that can be sad or scary or just interesting, but then think of someone who is trained to believe that their skin color is bad, or that theirs is better than someone else’s, and then it just makes me mad. Well, it makes me sick too.

I was also surprised to find out how quickly he gave up, to some extent. That was not just for the length of the initial experiment, but also that there was one city that he just could not stay in. There are ways in which it seems incomplete, because he really only saw certain areas, and the focus is on the South. At the same time, I can’t begrudge him that. It was a hard thing to do, and lonely, and most people wouldn’t do it at all. Also, because he quit taking the pills when he did, he had a period where he was able to go back and forth between passing for white and passing for black, and that gave him additional insight.

The version I read had an epilogue about what happened afterward, which had some sad parts, as there were shifts in the movement that were necessary, but offended many of the previous supporters, combined with the fact that there is still so much prejudice and inequality. I will sometimes take breaks between certain books, because too much in one vein will really leave me feeling that life is “nasty, brutish, and short”, and that is kind of true, but there is so much more to it than that.

One thing that is important though, and that I have been thinking about a lot lately, is how no matter how bad things get (and he writes eloquently about despair), it is the small kindnesses to each other that make things bearable. That is true across the board, and if there are times when they are not enough, perhaps that’s because there needs to be still more kindness. (And of course, I don’t just live for this world either, which helps.)

These things that I am writing about are not really particularly racial, but they are human, and that’s what I keep finding over and over again. It does not mean that there is no point in at times focusing on a specific group—I believe I get a lot of value from that—but always it comes back to us being human, with all the bad and good that entails.

One criticism I have read of the book is that “It’s a good book for white people.” That is completely true. People who receive “the hate stare” don’t need to be told that it exists. The point is that there were a lot of people who did need to know, and I think the book did a good job of telling them. Of course there were people who didn’t want to hear it, and still haven’t heard it. I guess that’s why reading history keeps on being timely. We just keep on repeating it.