Having recognized the depths of my own prejudices when I first saw my black face in the mirror, I was grateful to discover that within a week as a black man the old wounds were healed and all the emotional prejudice was gone. It had disappeared for the simple reason that I was staying in the homes of black families and I was experiencing at the emotional level, for the first time in thirty-nine years, what I had known intellectually for a long time. I was seeing that in families everything is the same for all people.
This was revealed in conversations about what to have for supper and how to pay the bills; about which child should help with the dishes and which should clear the table. It was revealed in the most obvious ways in which people in all families relate with each other. It was revealed in sitting with black parents and seeing that they responded to frustration as all human parents do. I was experiencing all this as a human parent and it was exactly as I experienced my own children.
The emotional garbage I had carried all of those years - the prejudice and the denial, the shame and the guilt - was dissolved by understanding that the Other is not other at all.
All human beings face the same fundamental problems of loving and of suffering, of striving toward human aspirations for themselves and their children, of simply being and inevitably dying. These are the basic truths in all people, the common denominators of all cultures and all races and all ethnic categories.
In reality, the Us-and-Them or I-and-Thou dichotomies do not exist. There is only one universal We - one human family united by the capacity to feel compassion and to demand equal justice for all.
I believe that before we can truly dialogue with one another we must first perceive intellectually, and then at the profoundest emotional level, that there is no Other - that the Other is simply Oneself in all the significant essentials.
This alone is the key that can unlock the prison of culture. It will neutralize the poisons of the stereotype that allow men to go on benevolently justifying their abuses against humanity.
Afterword
to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Black Like Me
(2011)
by Robert Bonazzi
Fearlessness is the first requisite of a spiritual life.
Cowards can never be moral.
—Mohandas Gandhi
Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through?
And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Fifty years ago John Howard Griffin embarked upon his 1959 journey through the Deep South disguised as a Negro. He risked a bold experiment based upon a simple but provocative premise never before tested. His intention was to experience daily life as a black laborer and to keep a journal with absolute truthfulness, even if his discoveries proved to be prejudicial, embarrassing or naive. His honesty was tested the very first time he looked at the mirror to examine his disguise. There he perceived “the face and shoulders of a stranger—a fierce, bald, very dark Negro” glaring back at him.
This powerful passage from Black Like Me reads like a loss of identity scene in a modern literary novel, but it was not fiction. Within that illuminated instant, his sense of self—physical, mental, emotional—had been thrown into chaos. But who had glared at whom? Was he the dark face reflected in the glass or the white consciousness reflecting upon it? Soon he realized he was both “the observing one and the one who panicked…” Griffin had projected his deepest fears onto the mirror, causing him to deny the truth of what he had witnessed. The emotional prejudice that intellect had long rationalized was exposed by his unexpected reaction of antipathy. “The worst of it was that I could feel no companionship for this new person. I did not like the way he looked,” he writes. “But the thing was done and there was no possibility of turning back.”
The stranger in the mirror was none other than the Other—that threatening mask of the stereotype that every culture affixes upon the face of every other culture. Griffin had encountered the Other-as-Self, coming face-to-face with his own unconscious racism. Initially he denied the truth he had witnessed, rationalizing it as the shock of recognition—even though it was his lack of recognition that truly startled him. However, from that transforming encounter emerged a unique double perspective, perceiving clearly the bias projected on his darkened skin by whites and the reality of racism known by Negroes. While he could never plumb the depths of experience that only black people can know, he was exposed for several weeks to the insane hatred of racial discrimination. Griffin delivered over 1,200 lectures to mostly-white student audiences. He encouraged them to repudiate the bigotry of earlier generations and envisioned in them the hope of healing the white community and the future of a peaceful, desegregated society. The core concept in Griffin’s writings about racism—that members of dominant groups tend to view minorities, because they seem different in some extrinsic way, as intrinsically other, and “as merely underdeveloped versions of their own imprisoning culture”—was intuited in Black Like Me and articulated in a seminal essay, “The Intrinsic Other” (1966).
In that essay Griffin examines this inculcated attitude and clarifies the fallacies inherent in the racist viewpoint. “One of the characteristics of our expression of such attitudes is that they are often perfectly natural to the speaker and unnatural to the hearer. They reveal in the speaker the falsity of viewing others as intrinsically Other, intrinsically different as men. This intrinsic difference always implies some degree of inferiority.”
Prejudices are taught directly or indirectly by elders but we are all submerged in the inculcation process. This unconscious environment of communication in which we are imprisoned blinds our perceptions to institutionalized racism. We tend to deny that racism exists in this new century, but our denial perpetuates the systemic process. “Implicit in this process,” Griffin writes, “is a consent to racism.” He cites the Irish jurist Edmund Burke for providing the “touchstone of this error when he said: ‘I know of no way to draw up an indictment against a whole people.’ Racism begins when we draw up an indictment against a whole people merely by considering them as a whole underdeveloped versions of ourselves, by perpetuating the blindness of the stereotype.”
After the publication of Black Like Me in 1961, Griffin was asked the same question persistently: Why had he done such a thing? He thought the question irrelevant, pointing out that it was a question black people never asked. Nonetheless, he attempted to answer it by saying: “If I could take on the skin of a black man, live whatever might happen and then share that experience with others, perhaps at the level of shared human experience, we might come to some understanding that was not possible at the level of pure reason.”
But the real answer, never an easy answer, must be tracked along the path of events that forced him to confront his own cultural conditioning. Griffin had grown up in Dallas, Texas, which was as segregated as the Deep South, and where the dominant white culture cast black people into Otherness. He characterized his childhood as “Southern in the old sense, the terrible sense. We were not rich but not poor either; we were genteel Southerners, and I was taught the whole mythology of race.”
As a student he had excelled in the sciences but felt under- challenged by the American educational system that stifled rapid advancement. Searching for greater challenges, he responded to a newspaper advertisement for a private boys’ school in France, saying he would sweep floors to earn his keep. To his amazement, six weeks later he was offered a scholarship to the Lycée Descartes in Tours. Although he spoke no French, and his reluctant parents could afford only one-way passage and a small monthly stipend, he sailed for Europe at the age of fifteen, in 1935.
Leaving for Europe, where he would encounter different cultures, initiated profound changes over the next five years. He recalled being pleased to see African students
in classes, but became indignant when they sat at the same table for lunch. He asked why and his French friends immediately responded: “Why Not?” The teenager was stunned and embarrassed to realize that he had never asked that question. While a “classical education” had expanded his knowledge and consciousness, his unconscious racism persisted.
After graduating from the lycée, he attended Medical School at Tours (also on scholarship) and attended some literature courses at the University of Poitier’s campus at Tours. Two years later, he became an graduate assistant to Dr. Pierre Fromenty, Director of the Asylum at Tours. But during the German occupation the director was conscripted into the French medical corps and the American, who could not be conscripted, was left in charge of 1200 patients, along with a nursing order of Catholic nuns. Soon after he joined fellow students in the underground resistance, and the asylum became a safe house where wounded soldiers got treatment.
The underground also gave temporary sanctuary to Jewish families from Germany, Belgium and France, in the alley boarding houses nearby, where Griffin heard parents, realizing that they would be shipped to concentration camps eventually, plead with him to take their children to safety. He helped smuggle children under the age of fifteen in the asylum ambulance—disguised as mental patients in straitjackets—out of Tours to the countryside, where other teams moved them on to England. In 1940, when the underground intercepted the Gestapo’s death list that included Griffin’s name, he was smuggled out of France, through England then Ireland, and back to the United States.
Griffin had witnessed the tragic effects of the Holocaust—refined to hideous perfection by the Nazis, who had drawn up an indictment against a whole people (the Jewish community of Europe), blaming their victims for every problem of German society. But he had not understood then the parallels between the Warsaw ghetto and every urban American ghetto; between anti-Semitism and white racism toward Negroes. Segregation—technically legal yet ethically unjust and immoral—was also an indictment drawn up against a whole people, the black community of America.
Enlisting in the Army Air Corps in 1941, he was shipped to the Pacific theater the following year. Impressed by his linguistic skills, the high command assigned him to an island in the Solomon chain where he lived for a year in a remote village. He studied the indigenous culture, translated their dialect and gathered strategic information from the native allies. Initially, he viewed the natives as “primitives”—as Other. But after he was unable to navigate jungle trails, and had to rely on a five-year-old child as a guide, it became obvious “that within the context of that culture, I was clearly the inferior—an adult man who could not have survived without the guidance of a child. And from the point of view of the local inhabitants—a valid point of view—I was Other, inferior, and they were superior.” It was an experiential truth he could not deny.
While living with Pacific islanders, Griffin developed a friendship with John Vutha, Grand Chief of the Solomons, who was a staunch ally of America in battling against Japan’s occupation. Vutha provided crucial information by tracking enemy movements and, when he had been captured and tortured by the Japanese, he refused to divulge allied positions. After 22 bayonet wounds, they left him for dead, hanging from a tree as an example. “There is little doubt that if he had given in and spoken,” Griffin writes, “the American victory at Guadalcanal might have been much slower in coming. Countless lives would certainly have been lost that were saved by his silence.” For his heroism, Vutha received the highest awards accorded by American and British governments.
In 1945, when a Japanese invasion plan was intercepted, Griffin was reassigned to the landing base on Morotai and resumed his duties as a radio operator. When the air raids were imminent, orders were sent to select one soldier for a dangerous mission. He drew the short straw and was dispatched to the radar tent at the edge of the airstrip with orders to destroy the files if the enemy invaded. That evening brought a steady rain. For the first time, he felt “a foreboding of violence, a certainty of death.” At nightfall he heard the scream of air raid sirens and the rumble of distant bombers. He ran down a slope toward a slit-trench for protection as the pattern bombing exploded along the airstrip. Just as he reached the rim of the trench, a nearby explosion catapulted him over the edge into darkness.
Two days later Griffin regained consciousness in the base hospital, suffering from a severe concussion that had impaired his eyesight. He kept his injury secret, pretending to read mail and playing the role of the recovering soldier until they promised to send him home. He earned the rank of sergeant, won medals and commendations, but never saved the stripes, claimed the awards, or filed for benefits. He had known war on both sides of the world and could not bear to be reminded of it.
Back home, he consulted eye specialists and was declared legally blind. Griffin was told that remaining light perception would be gone within 18 months. He sailed to France in the summer of 1946, to study music composition with Nadia Boulanger and composer-pianist, Robert Casadesus. After realizing he would not become a composer, he made a retreat to the Abbey of Solesmes, the fabled monastery of Gregorian Chant, where he was granted permission to study with the Benedictine monks. In 1947, he experienced an epiphany that nudged him “out of the agnosticism I had drifted into and led me eventually into the Catholic Church.” By Good Friday of that year he was totally blind.
Returning to America, Griffin settled on his parents’ country property near Mansfield, Texas. He raised livestock as a two-year experiment to prove that the sightless could become independent. His hogs were judged best of show locally and the experiment was a success. He wrote a guide for the sighted in their relationships with the blind, Handbook for Darkness, published in 1949. That same year he wrote a 600-page novel in seven weeks, based on his experiences with music and monasticism in France, and he began a journal in 1950, which he would keep over the next 30 years. Also, he studied audio tapes on theology and philosophy, lectured on Gregorian Chant and, in 1951, converted to Catholicism.
His first novel, The Devil Rides Outside, was published in 1952, and became a surprise bestseller. In 1953, he wed 17-year- old Elizabeth Holland in a Catholic ceremony, and the couple moved into a cottage on her family’s farm west of Mansfield, eventually raising four children during their 27 years of marriage. The 1954 paperback of The Devil Rides Outside was censored in Detroit, and then submitted by the publisher as a test case on pornography. This historic battle was adjudicated by the US Supreme Court in the publisher’s favor in 1957. The ruling established the significant precedent that a book must be evaluated in its entirety and not censored on the basis of objectionable words or passages quoted out of context. Nuni, a novel set on a remote island in the Pacific, came out in 1956. His third novel, Street of the Seven Angels, a satire on pornography, appeared forty years after it was completed, in 2003.
During a decade of sightlessness Griffin experienced what it was like to become the Other, because the sighted perceived him as handicapped. “A man loses his sight then, but let it be understood that he loses nothing else,” he declares in Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision (2004). “He does not lose his intelligence, his taste, his sensitivity, his ideals, his right to respect” and “remains as much an individual as always.” Then without warning, on January 9, 1957, Griffin began perceiving reddish glints of light that stunned and frightened him. He telephoned his wife to say that he thought he was seeing and then broke down in tears. Elizabeth dispatched the doctor to her husband’s studio and followed soon after. On that day he glimpsed images of his wife and children, quite literally, for the first time. In a state of shock, the patient was sedated and taken to a specialist. The media was on the trail of the story, so Griffin was sequestered in the nearby Carmelite monastery, where he had made regular retreats. He needed calm, for it was not known immediately if eyesight would improve or fade. With weeks of rest, optical exercises, and the aid of powerful lenses, his sight steadily improved and he was astonished by t
he glorious gift of sight. Griffin had accepted blindness as a matter of Divine Will, believing that he had been plunged into a long night of the soul for a purpose, and also that his sight- recovery had been a revelation of mystical healing. This spiritual dimension grounded his demand for equal justice as a human right, no matter what his personal sacrifice.
In 1959, on the night before departure to New Orleans to begin the Black Like Me experiment, Griffin writes in his journal: “Nothing is more difficult than to face this, than deciding to look squarely at profound convictions and to act upon them, even when doing so goes contrary to our desires. Yes, it must be done—deciding to abandon ourselves deliberately and completely to that which is so beautiful, justice, and to that which is so terrible, the reprisals, the disesteem of men. We know it, perhaps we have even done it—made the act, said the yes.”
When Griffin returned from the Deep South journey, he wrote a series of articles for the black monthly magazine, Sepia, published between April and October of 1960 as “Journey Into Shame”—a hasty first draft of Black Like Me. Before the first installment hit the news stands, he and his family were receiving death threats by mail and over the phone from white racists in their hometown of Mansfield. After being “lynched in effigy” (Griffin’s phrase) in April of 1960, his frightened parents made plans to sell their acreage and to resettle in Mexico, where older son Edgar owned real estate. By mid-August they had departed by car, and Griffin put his wife and three children on a plane bound for Mexico City two days later. He packed his own car and joined them all soon after. They settled in a small village overlooking the Spanish colonial city of Morelia, in the Sierra Tarasca mountains of Michoacán, about 130 miles west of Mexico City. It was their new home for nearly a year and Griffin wrote the final draft of Black Like Me there. This “lost” chapter in his story is told in Available Light: Exile in Mexico (2008). But during a series of communist student uprisings in Morelia, Griffin sent home his young family and elderly parents. He stayed on to write a report on the unrest, reflecting on the ironic fact that he had been hounded by the Nazis out of France, by the racists out of Mansfield, and finally by the communists out of Mexico.
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