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The Black Like Me By John Howard Griffin: An Analysis

1020 Words5 Pages

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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