Black Like Me

“A chill breeze rustled dead leaves in the woods. It carried an odor of fresh-turned dirt, drawing my attention to the fields where the tractor had only a few hours ago stopped plowing the earth.”

Griffin stops to appreciate the natural environment of the farmland of his home before leaving it for several weeks. He creates detailed imagery to convey the smells, sights, and feelings around him that evoke a sense of gratitude that he usually was not aware of.

“I was astonished to see an intelligent man fall for this cliché.”

When Griffin’s dermatologist tries to tell him that Black people with lighter skin are more trustworthy than darker-skinned Black people, Griffin is incredulous that an educated man would express such a racist and falsifiable idea. This illustrates the pervasiveness of discrimination in the 1950s southern United States, and it reflects an assumption on Griffin’s part that intelligence insulates a person from racist beliefs.

“The dark room. The streak of pale light through the transom. I woke to it several times, thinking it a long night. Then it occurred to me that there were no windows, that it might well be day outside.”

On his first night in New Orleans, Griffin finds lodging at a hotel, where he is given a “desolate,” windowless room. Griffin’s narrative style includes detailed imagery of the places he visits, which serves to illustrate the mood of the moment. Here, Griffin uses imagery to communicate the isolation, darkness, and loneliness that already pervades his experience.

“We were Negroes and our concern was the white man and how to get along with him; how to hold our own and raise ourselves in his esteem without for one moment letting him think he had any God-given rights that we did not also have.”

When Griffin meets Sterling confessing his identity and intentions, he finds that within minutes, Sterling seems to forget that Griffin is white, referring to himself and Griffin as “we.” Because of this intimacy and ease of communication, Griffin begins to feel like he is truly immersing himself in the identity of a Black man, although this is an illusion to some extent: Griffin can, and later does, remove the pigment from his skin, instantly regaining his privilege and status as a white man.

“A bluish haze hung over the narrow streets of the French Quarter. The strong odor of roasting coffee overwhelmed all others.”

Griffin’s use of visual and olfactory imagery brings the reader directly into the streets of New Orleans and into Griffin’s experiences. He is deeply observant and embraces every aspect of the experiences he has in order to provide as complete a picture as possible.

“It’s a vicious circle, Mr. Griffin, and I don’t know how we’ll get out of it. They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can’t deserve our rights.”

A Black café owner explains the “vicious circle” of discrimination to Griffin, illustrating how white-enacted policies prevent Black Americans from accessing quality education, work, housing, and resources. This system forces Black people into economically disadvantaged positions, exacerbated by high taxation. White people then see this economic disadvantage as “proof” that Black people are inferior and thus don’t deserve better.

“So, if you want to be a good American, you’ve got to practice bad Americanism. That makes sense, too.”

Griffin speaks to a man who notes irony in the contrast between American values and the South’s preoccupation with segregating and discriminating against Black people. America is supposed to be a country where all races and religions are welcome, where freedom reigns supreme, and where there is justice and morality for all people. Instead, Black folks in the South are discriminated against and taxed without representation due to disenfranchisement.

“All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy—that the Negro is treated not even as a second-class citizen, but as a tenth-class one.”

Griffin is horrified to experience the discrimination underlying segregation and the inconvenience, isolation, and humiliation it brings. He sees that Black people are not just treated as inferior, but are dehumanized, as every attempt is being made to remove them from their place as people with rights and dignity.

“Once again a ‘hate stare’ drew my attention like a magnet. […] 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. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you.”

Griffin is disturbed by the cold stares he receives from white strangers when he has dark skin, not just because of the threat to his own safety, but because he knows that it indicates a darker side to humanity that he does not relish witnessing. While these stares of course existed before he darkened his skin, he is unaware of them until he is on the receiving end and is incredulous at just how deeply hatred can run.

“Like shipwrecked people, we huddled together in a warmth and courtesy that was pure and pathetic.”

In the midst of the political tension surrounding the Mack Parker case, Griffin finds that bussing into Mississippi is harrowing and stressful. He and the Black passengers aboard the bus develop a sense of community and togetherness that aids in their finding the courage to confront what lay ahead.

“The noise poured forth like a jazzed-up fugue, louder and louder to cover the whisper in every man’s soul, ‘You are Black. You are condemned.”

Griffin notes that while white people would likely interpret loud music as celebratory or evidence of Black people’s happiness with their position in the South, he views the presence of rock and jazz music that permeates cities as a sign of desperation and distraction, a way for Black folks to escape the hopelessness they feel. Here, his views of Black people’s music are informed by the tension in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, following the lynching of Mack Parker.

“This tendency to make laws that are convenient or advantageous rather than right has mushroomed in Southern legislatures.”

Jim Crow laws not only codified “the color line”—a culture of separation, isolation, and discrimination against Black people—but also, as Griffin notes, other outright injustices, such as using Black people’s tax dollars to fund white supremacist organizations or fining churches that do not segregate their services. These laws were not created to perpetuate justice and morality, but instead to make white southerners comfortable.

“He cannot understand how the white man can show the most demeaning aspects of his nature and at the same time delude himself into thinking he is inherently superior.”

Griffin sees a notice posted by a white man in a bus station bathroom offering to pay Black women for sexual favors. When a Black man expresses derision at the notice, Griffin notes that Black Americans are aware of the illogical and contradictory nature of white people who see themselves as proper, good Christians with highly esteemed values, but at the same time show a completely different side of themselves when it comes to their attitudes toward Black people.

“He saw me as something akin to an animal in that he felt no need to maintain his sense of human dignity, though certainly he would have denied this.”

Many of the white men that Griffin hitchhikes with express a fixation on the sexuality of Black people. Griffin finds that these men not only hold stereotyped and degrading views, but also have no qualms about violating personal boundaries and dignity to inquire about Griffin’s sexual habits or genitalia. Griffin views this fixation as a reflection of the men who hold these views, suggesting there is a hidden side to them that only comes out when perceive that they are in the presence of an inferior person.

“You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and less leisure, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don’t spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man’s conditioning.”

Griffin considers The Illusion of Racial Differences as he imagines what it would be like if white people experienced the systems under which they have forced Black people to live. He emphasizes that the reasons for the issues that Black communities faced in the 1950s—such as poverty—are socially constructed, stemming directly from the policies enacted against them and racist attitudes. The “issues” that white people perceive thus result from The Psychological Effects of Discrimination, rather than any characteristic that can be ascribed to race.

As always, the conversation stalemated with, ‘None of it really makes any sense.’”

Griffin finds that in his dialogues with people about civil rights, change, and segregation in the South, the conclusion they arrive at is always the same: It feels illogical, based more on emotions and convenience than on any actual truth. This is a frustrating point of contention for Griffin as he attempts to understand why so many white people have such a desire to keep themselves on top.

“I saw it not as a white man and not as a Negro, but as a human parent.”

After accepting an offer to stay with a large, kind family with six children in their two-room shanty near an Alabama swamp, Griffin weeps as he thinks about the illusion of difference, determined by skin color, that determines these innocent children’s impoverished present and their futures. He sees his own children in them and knows that their situations, if reversed, would be much the same.

“I had begun this experiment in a spirit of scientific detachment. I wanted to keep my feelings out of it, to be objective in my observations. But it was becoming such a profound personal experience, it haunted even my dreams.”

Griffin wrestles with The Psychological Effects of Discrimination as he becomes more and more immersed in his experiment. He realizes he cannot be truly objective or separate his emotions from the project, because much of what he has experienced in just a few weeks has been so directly depraved and emotionally haunting.

“At such a time, the Negro can look at the starlit skies and find that he has, after all, a place in the universal order of things. The stars, the black skies affirm his humanity, his validity as a human being. He knows that his belly, his lungs, his tired legs, his appetites, his prayers and his mind are cherished in some profound involvement with nature and God. The night is his consolation. It does not despise him.”

During his travels, Griffin finds that many Black people only come out of their homes at night for fear of persecution or discrimination. Griffin adopts the same habit near the end of his journey as he grows more and more worn down by the treatment he experiences. Griffin’s relationship with the night goes deeper than a simple sense of safety, because when he looks up into the sky, he feels connected to something greater than himself and less alone.

“To them as to me, these simple privileges would be a miracle. But though I felt it all, I felt no joy in it. I saw smiles, benign faces, courtesies—a side of the white man I had not seen in weeks, but I remembered too well the other side. The miracle was sour.”

When Griffin first allows his skin to lighten again, he is instantly afforded the privileges of courteous service, freedom of movement, and peace of mind. He finds no joy in his treatment as a white man, however; his privilege feels “sour” due to a now-acute awareness of the degree to which Black people lack the rights and courtesy that he can so easily gain back. This lack of justice and morality burdens Griffin’s mind on a daily basis.

“Here men sought their center in God, whereas outside they sought it in themselves. The difference was transforming.”

Griffin visits a monastery and finds that the men there are only focused on their connection with God, rather than their hatred for others or their dominance of them. He finds the difference refreshing and healing. In making a direct comparison between these two perspectives, he illustrates how The Nature of Human Identity is intertwined with a person’s beliefs about others.

“I felt it was the best way of letting them know that their condition was known, that the world knew more about them than they suspected; the best way to give them hope.”

Griffin feels that his work is important and worth sharing with the world, and he is right insofar as many white people who may never have picked up a book written by a Black man benefited from hearing Griffin’s perspective. At the same time, Griffin positions himself as a type of savior or solution to the desperation and hopelessness Black people were facing when he suggests that his experiment—rather than the ways in which Black folks were already fighting for their rights and dignity—was the “best” way to achieve hope.

“So long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability, all real peace, all trust in man’s good intentions toward his fellow man.”

Griffin reflects upon his experiences in the last few weeks of his journey, in which he met with several Black civil rights activists working for change in the South. He notes that justice for one group must entail justice for all, because while one group suffers, the whole cannot be healthy, nor can relationships form.