Man against Man
East, P. D.
Man against Man BLACK LIKE ME, by John Howard Griffin. Houghton Mifflin. 176 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by P. D. East BY BLACKENING his skin, John Griffin, a white Texan, became, for all practical...
...And when I was a Negro, the whites judged me fit for the junk heap, while the Negroes treated me with great warmth...
...Yet when I was white, I received the brotherly-love smiles and privileges from whites and the hate stares or obsequiousness from the Negroes...
...But it is based on the personal experience of what must surely be one of the first white men to see the situation intimately from the point of view of both the white man and the Negro...
...Black Like Me is informative, moving, powerful...
...II From living the life of both white and black, Griffin confirmed his impression that there is not "even the communication of intelligent awareness" between the two races...
...Thinking that he could conduct the project objectively, Griffin was shocked to find that, while living the life of a Negro, he had difficulty picturing himself in his real identity, so complete was the psychological as well as the outward physical transformation...
...One is reminded of Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream, both in reading the report and in Griffin's statement in the "Preface": "The Negro...
...It is a valuable document, the only one of its particular kind on the racial question as it is posed today in the South...
...And, again, that the white man will reveal attitudes and traits of personality or character to the Negro that he never reveals to any white person...
...Beyond that, in universal application, it is a document on "man's inhumanity to man...
...These are details...
...He reports, for example, that the Negro says to the white man what he knows the latter wants to hear, not necessarily what the Negro actually feels or thinks...
...The South...
...And the effects of such an experience upon the white man involved are as interesting as the lessons he learned...
...The project, begun, in Griffin's own words, "as a scientific research study of the Negro in the South, .with careful compilation of data for analysis," ended with his filing the data and writing instead "the journal of my own experience living as a Negro...
...But a few of his conclusions may be summarized: f From his experience of switching from white to black, and vice versa, in the same locale, Griffin concluded that the relationship between the two races is based purely upon color: "I was the same man, whether white or black...
...Reviewed by P. D. East BY BLACKENING his skin, John Griffin, a white Texan, became, for all practical purposes, a Negro for a period of seven weeks...
...Such a report is necessarily partly subjective and interpretive...
...Black Like Me is this talented and skillful writer's report of his travels as a Negro through four Southern states...
...f Griffin reports genuine tragedy in that the" efforts of best-intentioned whites often fail because they overplay their supposed lack of prejudice, becoming "paternalistic," and therefore just as objectionable to the Negro as those who express outright prejudice—"We show our prejudice in our paternalism—we downgrade their dignity...
...One must read the book in its entirety, chronologically, in order fully to appreciate both the findings and the writer's commentary on them...
...The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls and bodies of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands...
Vol. 25 • November 1961 • No. 11
