Review of John Griffin's Black Like Me (Book Review Sample)

The black experience: Review of john Griffin’s black like me
John Howard Griffin
Black like me.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.1961
978-0-451-19203-5
Introduction
John griffin was born in June 16, 1920 in Dallas Texas to john Walter griffin and Lena may young. His love of music grew from his mother. He studied French and literature and later medicine. Left blind during the war, he began to write in 1946, where he also published his experience with blindness in the book scattered shadows. He married in 1953, one of his students Elizabeth Ann. He published the book ‘black like me’ in 1961
It’s a brilliant sociological study of the black experience, it mainly talks about a 39 year old white journalist who changed his skin tone and went to live among the blacks. He stayed for seven weeks among the blacks in one of South American states which were under racial segregation. Being a white man disguised in a black man’s skin he underwent all the social injustices that black men went through at that time.
Griffin’s journey mainly talks about the oppression the blacks faced at the time and his experience especially given that he was white. It brings him out as a man who went through a lot to experience what people from other cultures went through. It brings out what it was like to be a black person in the 1950s. The idea was a mirror up for the whites to see themselves in ways that they would otherwise not have. The contrast he faced by walking down the street now as a black man and not able to do the same things he used to do as a white man, ordering coffee or being able to use the bathroom, can’t be portrayed by any other person except the same person who once was white.
He puts himself through a lot of risk and danger. Firstly he takes drugs to make himself darker and goes to a state that is under racial segregation. He then is attacked by a white bully before he realizes that indeed there is hopelessness in being black. When he alternates his black and white characters, he often comes to the conclusion that the two races do not understand each other and there is a gap that separates the two. And even he himself feels a little out of place when he looks himself in the mirror, "In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger”, he writes, "a fierce, bald, very dark Negro glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me … I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else" From this extract we come to realize how deep the racialism was even griffin himself who was against it could not fully accept to see himself in the character of a black man.
Griffin’s outrage to this injustice was rooted in his own experience in Britain when he witnessed racism against Jews. Griffin was temporary blinded by war after being hit by shrapnel. During his partial loss of sight griffin realises that the blind only see a man’s heart and his intelligence. This leads him to enter into the character of a black man and try to experience what a black man goes through in a white community. He conveys the senses that although most whites are too intolerant to oppose racism, there are many good white people out there. He emphasizes that there are many non-violence ways to deal with social change.
The book explores racism and segregation. Black like me is written with the reader in mind and possibility to look at how a human can love. Griffin constantly puts his narration to move, interest, enthral its readers and persuade them in the importance of tolerance and how to practice justice in a social way.
Summary
John griffins was a white man and his actions are considered heroic given that he took it to himself against all odds to pose as a black man and explore the black world. He exposes what the black man has to endure in order to survive during the 1950s. He was partially blind at some time and this helped him refocus his energies in understanding people not through their face value but through their hearts and intelligence. When writing the book griffins narrates a life he lived himself and he probably tells a horrific story that he was the character.
At a time when racial discrimination was at its peak, one wonders what stoked that desire in him to try out that experiment. It also helps analyze the mentality of upper middle class whites who worked for social justice during the time. He is able to make friends and is quic...