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The Black Like Me By John Howard Griffin: An Analysis

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African-Americans have been subjected to racial injustices for ages due to their skin color, especially in the south. African-Americans can barely offer a home, let alone food for their families due to the obstacles whites have created. In the 1960’s Martin Luther King Jr. and others took action to stop the racial bigotry that African-Americans were undergoing this is important because Martin Luther King Jr. plays a big role in creating movements that help African-Americans and is talked about in both books. Although some blame the government for allowing the court to alter laws that oppress African-Americans, discriminatory whites are more at fault because they are the ones invoking and presenting them to the court. The nonfiction book “The …show more content…

When John Howard Griffin was transitioning, he was trying to figure out what his racial status quo would be after fully transitioning into an African-American man, “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?”(pg. 4). This quote shows how John thought he was going to be alright if he doesn't do anything wrong, he didn't realize how naïve that thought was. John Howard Griffin has witnessed the hatred whites have against African-Americans while on his journey to discover the racial treatment of African Americans “ You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light.[...] I felt like saying: “What in God's name are you doing to yourself?”’(pgs. 52-53). John Howard Griffin set out to experience racial injustice in. Different skin color in the 1960’s when racism was common to gain an understanding of how African-Americans feel about the

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Griffin should have taken the opportunity to accidently walk into the white’s bathroom and would have been able to experience what it was like to be yelled at for an accident instead he asked another black person where he should go. Griffin doesn’t take full advantages of the opportunities to be able to understand more about the race. Another opportunity griffin passed by that would have helped him embody a black person was when he was told “‘You’d better find yourself someplace else to rest’” (Griffin 43). Griffin could have peacefully protested and refused to move because he later discovered that negros had the right to sit in Jackson

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In Black Like Me, there were the blacks and the whites. A man named John Howard Griffin was one of many to want to experience the life of blacks (in the 1950's). Griffin received the courage to "climb into his skin and walk around in it". Now, there were many instances where he was treated differently just because his skin was black. For example, he couldn't use the same bathroom as whites; they had separate faculties.

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In the book, Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin you will realize his backgrounds from October 28, 1959 to December 14th 1959. Griffin was a white man who was from Texas who needed to carry on with the life of an African-American man from the south. The reason for Griffin doing this was to see what African American people experienced when they are segregated. In his own particular words, "In Black Like Me, I attempted to secure one straightforward truth, which was to uncover the craziness of a circumstance where a man is judged by his skin color, by his philosophical "mischance" – as opposed to by who he is in his humankind. I think I demonstrated that..."

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He slowly became more accepting and accustomed to the life of the South. It was “...here [that he] caught [his] first sight of colored people in large numbers” (Johnson 55). Overhearing coloured people talk, he became transfixed on the way they carried themselves when they spoke, especially their dialect. Nevertheless, the ex-coloured man became cowardice and decided he didn’t want to live the difficult life and experience the hardships of being a coloured man. It was “all at once a desire like a fever seized [him] to see the North again and [he] cast my lot with those bound for New York” (Johnson 88).

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By writing Black Like Me, John Griffin was trying to write down everything he felt was important on his journey as a black man. One of the major things wrote down was the idea of white racism. Which is the belief that white people are superior to other races and because of that should run society. So, the main topic of the novel was social divide of whites and African Americans. As a black man John saw the contempt white people had towards African Americans, and just the overall condescending attitude emanated from these people.

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John Howard Griffin is the author of the nonfiction book entitled, Black Like Me. While Griffin is most famously known for this book he has also been the author of other works, such as The Devil Rides Outside, Land of the High Sky, and The Church and the Black Man. In 1959, John Howard Griffin decided to get a firsthand account of what being black was like in the southern parts of the United States. Griffin himself is a white man living through the racial segregation happening in the 1950s, but feels he needs to become a black person in appearance to adequately experience life from an African American point of view. “How else except by becoming a Negro could a white man hope to learn the truth?”

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As he begins the experiment, he questions his identity during his transition from a white man to a black man and acknowledges this change in identity in the lines: “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

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In the novel Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, is the story of a white man who risks his life by darkening his skin to get first hand experience in the life of a negro. Griffin’s writing highlights the main character’s needs, the message of the story and relating struggles to the reader. “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?”

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