John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me Photo: Don Rutledge
By Tim Stanley in The Telegraph
6:58PM GMT 05 Feb 2015
With the release of the movie Selma, a lot of Americans are asking how far race relations have really come in the United States. On the one hand, the movie depicts the success of the Sixties civil rights crusade – its victory confirmed by Barack Obama’s election in 2008.
On the other hand, the recent deaths of young black men at the hands of white cops and vigilantes, and the resulting race riots, suggest that a lot of things haven’t changed at all. Whites may ask, “Why are working-class blacks angry? They have the right to vote and an African-American president – everything Martin Luther King Jr fought for.”
But some of the apparent triumph of black civil rights is a veneer. Racism isn’t just about law but about attitudes. Attitudes that are hard to change because of the gulf of understanding between different communities.
Can a white person ever really understand how a black person sees the world? Back in 1959, six years before Martin Luther King marched for civil rights in Selma, one man tried. A white Texan writer called John Howard Griffin walked into a doctor’s office in New Orleans and asked him to turn his skin colour black. Griffin took oral medication and was bombarded with ultraviolet rays; he cut off his hair to hide an absence of curls and shaved the back of his hands. Then he went on a tour of the Deep South.
The result was a bestselling book called Black Like Me, which is still regarded as an American classic. Griffin wanted to test the claim that although the southern United States was segregated it was essentially peaceful and just – that the two races were separate but equal.
What he discovered tells us a lot about the subtleties of racism. In 1959, unlike today, it was legally instituted. But, like today, it also flourished at the personal level – in hostility, suspicion, fear and even self-loathing.
Griffin was an extraordinary man. Born in Dallas in 1920, he went to school in France and joined the French Resistance after Hitler invaded. Griffin helped Jewish children escape to England before fleeing to America. While serving in the US army, he was blinded by shrapnel.
Griffin took it all in his stride – he married, had children and converted to Catholicism. Griffin’s strong personal faith reminds us that much of the civil rights movement was in fact a Christian mission – made possible, in this instance, by what seemed like a miracle.
The orginal cover of Black Like Me
Walking around his yard one afternoon, Griffin suddenly saw red swirls where hitherto there was only darkness. Within months his sight had returned. And it was a man determined to make the most of his second chance who hit upon the novel idea of crossing the colour line.
Those reading the book today might regard Griffin’s attempt to change his colour as akin to blacking up. Certainly, the transformation was awkward. Griffin may well have had dark skin but he retained his classically Caucasian features, and one suspects that the awkwardness of his encounters with some black people was down to them wondering if he was one of them or just horribly sunburnt.
Griffin did not become black per se but – more accurately – a white man suddenly disassociated from himself and his society. Looking into a mirror for the first time, he wrote, “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 ... The Griffin that was had become invisible.”
But by very dint of not being white – even if he wasn’t exactly black – Griffin experienced genuine alienation. He was chased down a street by a bored white thug shouting racial epithets. He was told that he was sitting in the “wrong” waiting room and had to move to the “blacks only” one. On buses Griffin boarded via the backdoor, and when he chivalrously tried to offer his seat to a white woman was accused of being “sassy”. Many whites were polite; a few were aggressively rude.
Often it was suggested that black people were dumb or up to no good; Griffin often got what he called “the hate stare”. Some of his encounters with Caucasians were heartbreaking. Griffin sat on a park bench and a white man on a seat opposite got up, walked over and politely advised him that he should leave. Griffin went away saying, “thank you” because he assumed that the park was segregated and the man was being helpful. Later he discovered that it wasn’t segregated at all. The fellow was a well-mannered bigot.
There was a great deal of eroticisation of African-Americans. When hitchhiking, Griffin found that white male drivers ignored him in the daylight yet picked him up in the dark. They asked questions that disturbed him greatly: “all show a morbid curiosity about the sexual life of the Negro, and all had, at base, the same stereotyped image of the Negro as an inexhaustible sex-machine with oversized genitals and a vast store of experiences, immensely varied.”
When working as a shoeshine boy, Griffin noticed that the friendlier a white customer was then the more likely he was to ask if there are any prostitutes working in the area. Every black man was seen as a potential source of sexual transgression.
And Griffin discovered that the victims of abuse can start to regard themselves as deserving of abuse. Riding on a bus, he encountered a young man who, because he was comparatively light skinned, thought he was superior to his darker kin: “He walked towards the rear, giving whites a fawning, almost tender look.
His expression twisted to a sneer when he reached the back and surveyed the Negroes. He sat sideways in an empty seat across the aisle from me and began to harangue two brothers behind him. ‘This place stinks …. Look at all of them – bunch of dirty punks – don’t know how to dress. You don’t deserve anything better.’” Later, this man said to Griffin of his race: “I hate us.”
The story indicates that one of the successes of segregation was to make black Americans feel inferior, to encourage them to think that all they deserved was a seat at the back of the bus. If there is a single reason why the incidence of crime or illegitimacy is unusually high among African-Americans today, it might be that racism can be so pervasive and oppressive that it eventually makes its prejudices come true.
That, at least, offers one explanation for the behaviour of the young black men killed apparently resisting arrest in 2014. Another is anger at constantly being the source of suspicion. Of course, it also doesn’t help that American cops are over-militarised and trained to regard every mild confrontation as another conflagration at the OK Corral.
Griffin published his findings in book format in 1961 and became an overnight sensation. The New York Times hailed the text as an “essential document of contemporary American life”, and in 1964 it was made into a somewhat cringeworthy film starring James Whitmore.
But the residents of Griffin’s hometown in Texas were not impressed; they hanged him in effigy. Black Like Me helped to raise awareness of the evils of segregation and with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Right acts in the mid-Sixties, it seemed for a while as if America was ready to confront that evil.
Griffin died in 1980 after suffering complications from diabetes - not, as rumour had it, as a result of the treatments he'd used to prepare for Black Like Me. In the years leading up to his death, Griffin’s writing had taken on a despairing tone. He had recognised the falseness of his own experiment.
A white man disguised as black could not understand the insecurities and resentments that came with hundreds of years of inherited slavery – nor did he have the right to lecture black people on the need for love and reconciliation. White people had a role to play in civil rights, but it had to be as allies rather than leaders. The movement needed to be for black people, by black people.
This issue is at the heart of a debate about the movie Selma, too. Some critics have complained that it fails to depict white civil rights activists prominently and that it inaccurately suggests that President Lyndon Johnson, a progressive Democrat, wanted Martin Luther King Jr to shrink his ambitions.
The struggle continues: Oprah Winfrey in Selma
Both criticisms miss the point of the movie, which is to tell a black story from the perspective of its subject. It is typical and natural for middle-class white liberals to want to see uplifting the oppressed as a common endeavour.
But the truth is that discrimination is too ingrained in society to imagine that the benign efforts of white leaders can eradicate it entirely, while it is only by establishing their dignity through independent political action that black Americans could ever hope to assert themselves in a society that regarded them as the lowest of the low. For those reasons, Black Like Me is a well-intentioned book but also a hopelessly anachronistic one.
History has shown that the only people who can liberate African-Americans are African-Americans. And that in the course of their efforts, they should expect resentment among their white enemies and some bruised feelings among their white allies.
But by very dint of not being white – even if he wasn’t exactly black – Griffin experienced genuine alienation. He was chased down a street by a bored white thug shouting racial epithets. He was told that he was sitting in the “wrong” waiting room and had to move to the “blacks only” one. On buses Griffin boarded via the backdoor, and when he chivalrously tried to offer his seat to a white woman was accused of being “sassy”. Many whites were polite; a few were aggressively rude.
Often it was suggested that black people were dumb or up to no good; Griffin often got what he called “the hate stare”. Some of his encounters with Caucasians were heartbreaking. Griffin sat on a park bench and a white man on a seat opposite got up, walked over and politely advised him that he should leave. Griffin went away saying, “thank you” because he assumed that the park was segregated and the man was being helpful. Later he discovered that it wasn’t segregated at all. The fellow was a well-mannered bigot.
There was a great deal of eroticisation of African-Americans. When hitchhiking, Griffin found that white male drivers ignored him in the daylight yet picked him up in the dark. They asked questions that disturbed him greatly: “all show a morbid curiosity about the sexual life of the Negro, and all had, at base, the same stereotyped image of the Negro as an inexhaustible sex-machine with oversized genitals and a vast store of experiences, immensely varied.”
When working as a shoeshine boy, Griffin noticed that the friendlier a white customer was then the more likely he was to ask if there are any prostitutes working in the area. Every black man was seen as a potential source of sexual transgression.
And Griffin discovered that the victims of abuse can start to regard themselves as deserving of abuse. Riding on a bus, he encountered a young man who, because he was comparatively light skinned, thought he was superior to his darker kin: “He walked towards the rear, giving whites a fawning, almost tender look.
His expression twisted to a sneer when he reached the back and surveyed the Negroes. He sat sideways in an empty seat across the aisle from me and began to harangue two brothers behind him. ‘This place stinks …. Look at all of them – bunch of dirty punks – don’t know how to dress. You don’t deserve anything better.’” Later, this man said to Griffin of his race: “I hate us.”
The story indicates that one of the successes of segregation was to make black Americans feel inferior, to encourage them to think that all they deserved was a seat at the back of the bus. If there is a single reason why the incidence of crime or illegitimacy is unusually high among African-Americans today, it might be that racism can be so pervasive and oppressive that it eventually makes its prejudices come true.
That, at least, offers one explanation for the behaviour of the young black men killed apparently resisting arrest in 2014. Another is anger at constantly being the source of suspicion. Of course, it also doesn’t help that American cops are over-militarised and trained to regard every mild confrontation as another conflagration at the OK Corral.
Griffin published his findings in book format in 1961 and became an overnight sensation. The New York Times hailed the text as an “essential document of contemporary American life”, and in 1964 it was made into a somewhat cringeworthy film starring James Whitmore.
But the residents of Griffin’s hometown in Texas were not impressed; they hanged him in effigy. Black Like Me helped to raise awareness of the evils of segregation and with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Right acts in the mid-Sixties, it seemed for a while as if America was ready to confront that evil.
Griffin died in 1980 after suffering complications from diabetes - not, as rumour had it, as a result of the treatments he'd used to prepare for Black Like Me. In the years leading up to his death, Griffin’s writing had taken on a despairing tone. He had recognised the falseness of his own experiment.
A white man disguised as black could not understand the insecurities and resentments that came with hundreds of years of inherited slavery – nor did he have the right to lecture black people on the need for love and reconciliation. White people had a role to play in civil rights, but it had to be as allies rather than leaders. The movement needed to be for black people, by black people.
This issue is at the heart of a debate about the movie Selma, too. Some critics have complained that it fails to depict white civil rights activists prominently and that it inaccurately suggests that President Lyndon Johnson, a progressive Democrat, wanted Martin Luther King Jr to shrink his ambitions.
The struggle continues: Oprah Winfrey in Selma
Both criticisms miss the point of the movie, which is to tell a black story from the perspective of its subject. It is typical and natural for middle-class white liberals to want to see uplifting the oppressed as a common endeavour.
But the truth is that discrimination is too ingrained in society to imagine that the benign efforts of white leaders can eradicate it entirely, while it is only by establishing their dignity through independent political action that black Americans could ever hope to assert themselves in a society that regarded them as the lowest of the low. For those reasons, Black Like Me is a well-intentioned book but also a hopelessly anachronistic one.
History has shown that the only people who can liberate African-Americans are African-Americans. And that in the course of their efforts, they should expect resentment among their white enemies and some bruised feelings among their white allies.
