Black Like Me: Essay

Black Like Me: Essay

Black Like Me: Essay
ENG-2D1
Black Like Me is a story about a writer named John Howard Griffin. For years he had pondered the idea of changing his skin colour from white to black. This experiment would help him to understand racism from a black person’s point of view. Black Like Me discusses the difficulty with skin colour within a racially unjust society and the damaging effects such a society has on the black community. Furthermore Black Like Me also discusses three major themes, the theme of white racism, negro strengths and white sensitivity.

Firstly, Black Like Me is a real life account of the experiences of John Howard Griffin, and how he transformed his skin colour in the deep south for six intense weeks. His new skin colour allows him to study the effects of white racism from a black person’s point of view. As a result of this the first theme that emerges is white racism. Black Like Me describes white racism as cruelly and completely corrupting the heart, body and intelligence not only of the black people but also the opposed white people. The Negros in the story accept the ideas and effects of racism. For example when John Howard Griffin is on the bus he acknowledges a white women in a friendly manor, she looks at him and responds “what are you looking at me like that for?” (Page 20) All the white people start to give him dirty looks like he had just committed a terrible crime, the black passengers don’t even look up or flinch. This is the perfect example to prove that the black people are not at all bothered by white people but white people must be bothered because they seem to make big scenes. At this point John Howard Griffin had forgotten he had changed his skin colour.

Secondly, Black Like Me illustrates the theme of black strengths. Which is defined as, blacks together are stronger when they stick together that alone, therefore they are stronger in numbers (this holds true for group). For example during the story John...