'Black Like Me' is the account of the experiences of a white man, the author, who considered himself an expert in ‘race relations', but who had no real experience of how black people lived, so decided to change his skin pigmentation and travel in the South as a black man. This book is the result of all his recorded experiences written in a journal.
The experience of changing his skin tone was pretty complicated. He had to take many doses of a drug that was used to treat a disease called Vitiligo, which causes lightening of the skin, and he put himself under a tanning lamp for up to fifteen hours a day. He shaved his head and used dye to cover the uneven areas on his skin. After the change, when he finally looked in the mirror, he was shocked. He did not recognize himself; what he saw was a person “imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship…the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness.” (Griffin, p. 10) He changed his appearance only; he did not change his name or his identity. He told people that he was a writer exploring the South.
He started in New Orleans, where he had undergone the treatment. He had befriended a shoeshine man there, who did not recognize him as a black person; he could only tell by his shoes. So he told this man what he was doing, and spent a few days with him and his buddy. They cooked and ate frugally, and he noticed the reactions of the white men; if they wanted something, like a black woman, they would act really familiar with them.
[...] Close living quarters brought on by poverty accounted for lack of privacy, and sometimes-young black women were forced to give their bodies to their white bosses to hold a job to feed their children. This was just a continuation of the dynamic between white landowners and their female slaves. Finally, the academic understood and apologized to Griffin for asking him to expose himself. In any other pretext, and if the races had been reversed, this would have been viewed as totally disrespectful, if not criminal, but since it was white-to-black behavior, Griffin (and society) was expected to excuse it. [...]
[...] He published a paper expressing his views, and, pressured by society, lost friends and began receiving threatening phone calls, saying things like - was a goddamn nigger- loving, Jew-loving, Communist son-of-a-bitch.” (Griffin, p. 76) He began carrying a gun. Then he took Griffin back to the campus of a black college in New Orleans, and then Griffin again ventured into Mississippi, Biloxi this time, where he experienced overt racism when a white man would not let him use his broken-down privy, for no other reason than that he was black, and directed him to one fourteen blocks away! [...]
[...] Then, in Hattiesburg, he participated in a barbeque which, he said, the whites would interpret as a happy party, the blacks having a good time, but he saw it for what it really was “Would {the whites} see the immense melancholy that hung over the quarter, so oppressive that men had t dull their sensibilities in noise or wine or sex or gluttony in order to escape it The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs, and to sob would be to realize, and to realize would be to despair. So the noise poured forth like a jazzed-up fugue, louder and louder to cover the whisper in every man's soul. are black. You are condemned. [...]
[...] Griffin began to have nightmares in the midst of his experience, a nightmare that he was being chased and threatened by whites, and pushed up against a wall. He was surprised to find that the mission he had taken on, in which he thought he could be objective, had really pierced his emotions and even his subconscious so he was experiencing it even in his dreams. He felt bad that he woke up screaming in the monastery where all the inhabitants took a vow of silence. [...]
[...] Griffin hired a white photographer to go back with him to the places he had passed and, as a black, it was hard to get pictures, because the blacks were suspicious of him, so they had to pretend to not know each other, and the photographer took his picture as a random tourist. Finally, after seven weeks, Griffin returned to his family, and embracing his children, he realized that picture of the prejudice and bigotry from which I had just come flashed into my mind, and I heard myself mutter: God, how can men do it when there are things kike this in the world?'” (Griffin, p. [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
