Black Like Me Book Report

Our racial ethnicity is influential in what we do in life, whether it be with school, personal relations, or even job opportunities. There are some, Americans today who hold racial prejudice against people of different color and ethnicity, which as a result narrows opportunities that minorities can actually have. In the essay “Race in America: “We Would Like To Believe We Are Over The Problem” Maryann Cusimano Love, an associate professor of international relations in the Politics Department at Catholic University, addresses the idea that “To get over racial problems” we need to acknowledge them as well as the history of difficult racial problems in order to move forward as a multicultural society.(387) Love reveals a study conducted

When John Howard Griffin wrote the book “Black Like Me” he made it so that it was set in the southern states of the 1950’s. Griffin was a middle age man during the era of segregation ,he decided to change the color of his skin to see how his kind will react to the new depiction. The setting was critical to the story for being in the post-slavery era people where blacks and whites were separate but not equal. The tone of the story is gentle yet produces a powerful meaning. The main message from this story is racism is a very evil subject.

With his new identity, Griffin travels to New Orleans, Alabama and Mississippi, where a black man was just murdered by a mob. He immerses himself within the black community and finds a sense of hopelessness. The black community is feeling hopeless because no one will hire them and they can only use the bathroom, eat and shop in designated “black” areas because of their race. Even though his skin color is the only thing about him that has changed, he is mistreated everywhere he goes.

When people give criticism, it is sometimes unwanted by the author of the piece; especially when it is negative. In Black Like Me, John Griffin performed an experiment that changed his skin color, “...something over which one has no control” (Black Like Me 1). By doing this, he hoped to understand the racial discrimination experience of a black person. Griffin stated, “How else except by becoming a Negro could a white man hope to learn the truth?” (Black Like Me 1). After his six weeks touring the Deep South, he published his journal. As before, many critics believe that his story is false and that it was again, “the white man’s experience as a Negro in the South, not the Negro’s.” Those who say this are, in their own respects, correct. Griffin only experienced discrimination for a short amount of time, unlike black people who experience it their entire lives. For him to understand the discrimination that black people face, he would have to be discriminated against for his real race. “They judged by no other quality. My skin was dark. That was sufficient enough for them to deny me those rights and freedoms without which life loses its significance and becomes a matter of little more than animal survival” (Black Like Me 115). This shows that Griffin experienced the basic level of discrimination and not the rest of the atrocities committed

Griffin is not an African American, so he could not truly have had the same African American experience personally in their point of view. Griffin did not take his experience across the globe, so id does not include all the African Americans, just the South, the ones he meets and the ones Griffin comes across.

While sitting in his barn one night, he read an article about increasing suicide rate within the negro community. This had really upset Griffin. He began to think about how blacks and whites are now supposed to live together in harmony, but neither one of the races knows anything about the other. In fact, they really do not care to know an absolute thing. This upset him so much

Overall, Black Like Me was an entertaining and informative read. I personally have a lot of respect for John Griffin for his courage to do what he did. It was very interesting to see how someone who previously saw things from a white man’s point of view, suddenly had to deal with life from a black man’s point of view. Griffin was able to really understand what it's like to be an African American in a racist and discriminatory area. It really stuck out to me how the same man could be treated two completely different ways, depending on his skin color. I think it goes both ways, that a white man will never understand things from a black man’s perspective, and a black man will never understand things from a white man’s perspective. I would definitely

Black Like Me. is a non-fiction novel written by John Howard Griffin. Griffin started writing this novel On October 28, 1959. Black Like Me is a primary source of Griffin’s experience of being a black man in the south during the late 50’s and early 1960’s while the Civil Rights movement began. Griffin starts the journal entries by asking the question “If a white man became a Negro in the Deep South, what adjustments would he have to make? What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin color, something over which one has no control?” These questions foreshadows the events that occurred and intrigue the reader.

When author is first transformed into a black man, he finds that, though he retains his original identity, Southern citizens still treat him differently. According this, I learned that people are the product of their upbringing, and that, at birth. Nevertheless, as they observe their surroundings, the clarity of their persona is clouded, causing the unkind attitudes that result in racism. My favorite part of the book was when he was invited to stay overnight by a black family. While staying with a poor black family in the swamps of Mississippi, Griffin discovers the reality of the situation, he witness that much of the African American race has no hope of advancement, all due to the oppression forced upon them by the white racists. “Black Like Me” is a short book, but I think that the social message of Griffin’s experience comes across through the book narrative structure, which largely functions as a catalog of the different forms of racial oppression in the United

“Black like Me” written by John Howard Griffin, who is also the narrator of this novel documenting his experience of being a “Negro” in the Deep South during the 1950s. Griffin tells the story about his journey of darkening his skin pigmentation consequently allowing him to truly encounter the racism of the South. He frequently comes into contact with the racism of the privileged white southerners, revealing the harsh extremities that the African Americans are forced to live through everyday. During “Black like Me”, Griffin sees learns the actual villainous enemy is racism caused by ignorance, fear, and false propaganda.

Griffin accounts for the racism that the black people have to go through on a day to day basis because he had the first-hand experience after changing his skin color "Do you suppose they 'll treat me as John Howard Griffin, regardless of my color—or will they treat me as some nameless Negro, even though I am still the same man?" (4). He goes ahead and describes this theme as the story of people in the society who can destroy the bodies and the souls of others but in the end, destroy themselves. This means that racism completely destroys and corrupts the body, soul, intelligence and the hearts not only of the oppressed black people in the white societies, but it also dehumanizes the white people, who are the oppressors. From an analysis of the main point presented in the book, it becomes clear that the black people were not allowed to drink in the same places or even use the same bathrooms as the white people in the society. As a black man, griffin undergoes racism to the highest extent. He becomes to realize that the black people in the American society were segregated and were not allowed to use the amenities of the white people used. In his book, Griffin points out that the black people in the society act in the manner they do not because of their color, but because they are victims of suppressions and oppression by the dominant white community. This comes out clearly as he gives an account of how the black people could not

The job is not allowed or hard to find it for black people. Griffin goes out to look for a job, but his clothes are gentleness and he is willing to even to consider finding a job, no one seems to believe that he would really be competent. As he begins to feel harassment of the white race more and more, Griffin starts to feel down his own blackness for causing him such pain, and even to

John Howard Griffin, The author and main charter of, Black like Me, Griffin is a middle-aged white man living in Mansfield, Texas, in 1959 with a wife and two kids. Griffin gets the idea of traveling to the Deep South, changing his skin color, but not his identity, to see what it’s like being a black man not knowing what he’s really getting into. He left his family, friends and moved to the Deep South. With the help of his friends and the F.B.I.

To start, one of the first adjustments Griffin made in order to survive in the South as an African American man was to not only change the pigment of his skin, but also, to change his entire appearance. Through the help of his friend, he realized that even his body hair must be shaved in order to reflect the black culture. Yet, the same people that wanted him to fit into his own microculture, also wanted him to mock that of a more “respected” one. It was in his book he writes that “ in order to succeed, he had to become an imitation white man - dress white, talk white, think white, express the values of middle-class white culture”(190). This idea that a black man must mold to white culture in order to find prosperity in the United States is what Griffin found most astonishing. This is especially evident in the quote, “if he(the black man) succeeded, he was an alienated marginal man - alienated from the strength of his culture and from fellow black men, and never able, of course, to become that imitation white man because he bore the pigment that made the white man view him as intrinsically other”(190). Griffin found himself like many other black men during the

between a white and a black man and settles in his mind that everyone is a human being. Griffin narrates that in his life as a black man he witnesses sociability, which is the one thing he never thought as a white man existed within the black society. Griffin had never practiced what it meant to be black, and his I position was enlightened by how the blacks behaved towards white people and what they said. In his white society, the “I” position regarding blacks was not quite a real picture of the blacks experience in the racist society. As a black man, he saw things in a new light and realized how racism was established among white people.