Black Like Me: John Howard’s Griffin Experiment on Race

  “This may not all of it. It may not cover all the question, but it is what it is like to be Negro in a land where we keep Negros down.

.... The Negro, the South. These are details. The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls and bodies of other men...."

(Griffin, the author)

Continuing with Margaret Meade’s infinite wisdom, took part of her bibliography and quoted authors and in particular just finished one: Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin.

Griffin’s book is an anthropological experiment that took place in the late 1950’s at the time of segregation in the Southern United States. His experiment consisted of darkening his skin with various ointments, sunlamps, shaving his head and a dermatological treatment utilized on patients affected with vitiligo, and interning himself as a “black man” for several weeks beginning in New Orleans and then in other cities of the south. 


 His journal of the ensuing weeks is a testimony not only to the travails and injustice practiced against African Americans at that point in time, but against any type of discrimination (against women, indigenous people, against other species – more on that below). In fact, the book’s preface has the following universalist passage:

            “This may not all of it. It may not cover all the question, but it is what it is like to be Negro in a land where we keep Negros down.

.... The Negro, the South. These are details. 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 other reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared and the detested. I could have been a Jew in Germany, a Mexican in a number of states, or a number of any ‘inferior’ group.

....  It traces the changes that occur to heart and body and intelligence when a so-called first-class citizen is cast on the junk heap of second-class citizenship.”

The conversation of race became personal and once again strongly highlighted (it never really leaves you), during the last three months I spent in the US after a long absence from NY. Many conversations, in particular those with African Americans, Latin Americans etc, turn at some point to race. I am deeply aware of the differences ever since immigrating to California when I was 13 years old, of being “brown”. In fact, now that I live in Brazil, this country where there is “no“ racial tension, I see the race issues bubble everywhere, incredulous at the Brazilian racial inequality being swept under the rug. Quoting Griffin again on what the world looks like once you are “tainted” by the inescapable race differences, he writes:

“ I walked through the streets of Mobile [Alabama] throughout the afternoon…I had known it then as a privileged white. It had impressed me as a beautiful southern port. Now walking the same streets as a Negro, I found no trace of the Mobile I formerly knew… the gracious southerner.. was nowhere visible...”

Locations, time, the prism of race is all encompassing, including language. So much conversation, polite and impolite, about politically correct language so oft used in the United States where mailman is mailperson, about the definition of Obama in the census as a black or white man, about defining oneself as Hispanic, indigenous, Latin American, definitions. Griffin, also has something to say to this point:

            “ I learned a strange thing, that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word ‘nigger’ leaps out with electric clarity.”

----- o -----

I have recently moved to Sao Paulo from Rio de Janeiro. In conversations, the verbalization of this fact is accompanied by a forlorn look from the other party given all the beauties and joy of Rio – Carnival, Samba, the happiness of the inhabitants despite the abject property the absurd number of homeless people. Needless to say, their feeling turns into shock when knowing that I don’t share their view. Why? A few reasons that I will not dwell on, but one reason that is well verbalized by Griffin in particular as it pertains to Carnival and this so called “happiness”:

            “ the music consumed in its blatant rhythm all other rhythms even that of the heartbeat. I wondered how all of this would look to the casual observer…. They might say, ‘they are happy’…. ‘Despite their lowly status, they are capable of living jubilantly’. Would they see the immense melancholy that hung over the quarter so oppressive that men had to dull their sensibilities in noise or wine or sex or gluttony in order to escape it? The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs, and to sob would be to realize and to realize would be to despair.”

For the same reasons, when I go to London I find no delight attending clubs named “Favela Chic” or while in Rio, do not see Carnival as this expression of all encompassing joy. 

----- o -----

Griffin, the author, in his transformation

Griffin’s book took me back to my first trip to Africa in 2001. In particular, I had to disagree with him when points out to his complete transformation to one of “them”.  One day while in an Alabama swamp he remarks:

            “The transition was complete from the white reading a book about Negroes in the safety of his white living room to an old Negro in the Alabama swamps”

I found this impossible and potentially one of the weak points of the book (the only weak point, no other jumps at me). Tis impossible to be “complete” I have found; I tried to do the same while in Africa. Quickly however, I learned in the forest of Nosy Mangabe and in particular in the hospital in Nampula after falling ill with diarrhea that I could never feel what another “second” class citizen (irregardless of class) feels, the oppression, the lack of alternatives (I already was able to feel what a “second” class citizen felt from my earlier experience). In my case, I was able to treat myself in a hospital and go from my lowly 5^th class hotel and upgrade quickly to a 3-star hotel when I befell ill. Griffin has that same potential, and that fact makes us different. 

So the question rises, what can we do? If we cannot empathize fully, what can be done to questions like I received in Mozambique while I was teaching there in 2001:

“Professor, why in the Bible, if Mary and Joseph are white, then why am I black?”

What can be done erase this impression, not only from black male children, but from all children:

            “ at a more personal level, it began to be understood, and was then quickly understood, that black society must work to salvage the black male child… It was pointed out that the black male child even in a black school using white textbooks, could easily come to the conclusion that all the heroes in history were white men”

All the heroes, even Joseph and Mary, the holy Trinity, “God” as represented in ecclesiastical iconography flaunts a white man and beard. What can be done? Griffin in his closing pages also offers a solution, not hope, but a solution, to which I subscribe to (and hence AZLera and the may other ideas that accompany it).

            “… they recognized that so long as the Negro had to depend on white banks to finance their projects for improvement and growth, he was at the mercy of the white man. They recognized that economic emancipation was they key to the racial solution.”

The above takes me back to the NY times article of the Bronx black business man whom was recently in the news whose long-life dictum to success and motivation as the key to African American empowerment was to follow the golden rule: whomever has the gold rules. Dictum, truer even now in the era of “It’s the economy stupid!” quotes, than before.

To conclude, I think now the issues Griffin arises in this book involve more than Mexican immigrants, Ethiopian farmers or Burmese refugees. With 6.3bn people in the world, the issues are more holistic, ever more pressing. We are a successful species by any definition, relegating to second-class species any species that is not us: all resources are ours to manage, we are stewards of the environment. 

The truth is we are not. We are ignorant, and we should not manage something we don’t understand. The environment is not ours and neither the animals than inhabit it. What do we do then?  “Caritas: love for all people”, Griffin suggests. I suggest love for all life.