Black Like Me By John Howard Griffin

Griffin struggled with the idea of what it would be like for a white man to become black and learn what kind of adjustments would need to be made (1). Griffin was a dedicated journalist who did what it took to truly capture the life of a Negro. “How else except by becoming a Negro could a white man hope to learn the truth?” (1). He understood that to understand the Negro, he needed to become a Negro. His humility in recognizing his lack of knowledge about the “Nergo’s real problem” (2) is what made John Howard Griffin such an excellent journalist.

The diversity between Americans has always been evident, and not just by the skin tone or religion, but also by their backgrounds, as well as how their lives are like today. Especially in African Americans and those who wanted to change the ways of religion, and the prejudice against them continues to stick, even today.

The book’s narrator and main character is Griffin himself. At the beginning of the book, Griffin is living in small town rural Texas. Being an adamant supporter of the civil rights movement and plagued by an inability to understand what the black community is going through, Griffin decides to take a radical step. He hatches a plan to go undercover and surgically change his appearance to that of a black man. Griffin then plans to write an article chronicling his experience. He travels to the deep south to experience racism first hand.

DANIELLE JI: Good afternoon, this is Danielle Ji, host of today’s show with the very man who has created much havoc on the racial question. In the Deep South of the 1950s, it was a great privilege to be in the shoes of a white man. But this man, a journalist for Sepia, used medication that darkened his skin into a dark brown and walked the streets as a Negro for six weeks, all documented in his fascinating narrative, Black Like Me, written in 1962. Please welcome…John Howard Griffin!

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

In John Griffin’s experiment to see what it’s like on the other side have white people –and black- see the hypocrisy that lies within their behavior. The novel Black like Me is a journal of the excursions that Griffin has a black person in the South. The time, 1959, was just before the height of the Civil Rights Movement. John Griffin actually lived in the South and even visited the places he would reencounter as a black man, so he was able to truthfully account the differences he would encounter. In this double-life novel John Griffin unveils the ugly truth on America’s never-ending hypocrisy.

In the beginning of the book, Griffin thoroughly believes that the only way “to bridge the gap between us [white men and Negros] was to become a Negro.” He took the next step after developing this hypothesis and literally became a black man after several days of rigorous treatment to his skin. He looked like a Negro through and through, so much that once he saw his new self, he had an identity crisis. The John Griffin he once knew was erased and replaced with an unfamiliar dark face that goes off into the city looking for a place to stay. As he does this, he observes how people treat him and sees a huge difference in treatment between his once white self and his now black self. Before his transformation, white people had greeted him with friendly smiles and gestures and black people glared at him resentfully.

south with the whites. John begins his journey in New Orleans where he gets his

For a start, John notices himself in the mirror for the first time and is astonished by the image portrayed in front of him. “The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence” (Griffin 10). According to the quotation, John Griffin is experiencing the change to a different person he is shocked, but needs to compose the situation in order to encounter other African American citizens and study their ways of life.

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

So, Mr. Griffin had a multistage process done on his body so that the pigment of his skin would appear darker. After many treatments of ultraviolet light and tablet pills, Mr. Griffin had become a black man. After Mr. Griffin’s transformation was complete, he immersed himself into the black community. Mr. Griffin was not prepared for what would happen to him once in the black life. While Mr. Griffin traveled to different places in the south he met numerous people, both black and white. Some people were friendly while others were quite hostile.

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

In the fall of 1959 John Howard Griffin, a white man, was engrossed with the state of the race/segregation issue in the southern United States. To accomplish this task JHG took special pills and exposed himself to ultraviolet rays to darken the pigmentation of his skin, on top of the pills he also rubbed in a special dye that caused his skin to become even darker. After “transforming” into a bald-headed, black man JHG set across the southern United States. On his adventure he kept a journal, to document the events, in his journal he wrote about the people that he met and the advisement that they gave him. A considerable amount of the quotes throughout the journal Black like Me are profound and carry a meaning

I will try to tackle your first question Shakespear. I think I can see why Fanon would be so skeptical of an economical approach towards “disalienation” and would be more inclined to a “psychological fix”. Early in his work, Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon introduces us to Mayotte Capecias, a black woman married to a wealthy white man. In his description of her, he retells a story that Mayotte had told him. She had repeatedly asked her husband, Andre, to allow her to accompany him to the Didier, a social club for the “Marinique whiteys” (61). Yet, even though Mayotte has scaled the social ladder with her marriage to Andre, while she was at Didier she is not never at ease. The thoughts of her “wearing too much makeup” or “not properly dressed”

In the novel, Black Like Me, written by John Howard Griffin, he uncovers the racist tendencies and ideologies some Southerners held during the time of the 1950’s. In order to experience and gain a true understanding of this tense climate between the two races in the South, he made the radical decision to mask his skin to resemble that of a black man. Along the way, Griffin had the chance to analyze the conditions of the south through both the black and white lense. During his time traveling, he came to the conclusion that although not all whites were universally racist, the treatment of the black community was still harsh.