Free English Literature Dissertations - With My Decision To Become A Negro I Realised That I, A Specialist In Race
With my decision to become a negro I realised that I, a specialist in race issues, really knew nothing of the Negro’s real problem.
Was he [,Griffin,] the dark face reflected in the glass of the white consciousness reflecting upon it?
By making race ambiguous, by assuming the role of white Other, Griffin exposes not only the fervent racism at the heart of the American South but also, perhaps more importantly, discovers that the real problem that he sets out to find, lies not primarily with the failure of white people failing to realise racial equality, but that the problem lies in the hearts of all people. He says: [w]alking along Dryades, through the ghetto, I realised that every informed man with whom I had spoken, in the intimate freedom of the colored bond, had acknowledged a double problem for the Negro. First, the discrimination against him. Second, and almost more grievous, his discrimination against himself; his contempt for the blackness that he associates with his suffering; his willingness to sabotage his fellow Negroes because they are part of the blackness he has found so painful. By being a white man from the deep South, it is safe to assume that Griffin was already leaden with preconceived notions of blackness and whiteness to begin with; as we all unconsciously draw distinctions between blackness and whiteness; however, the second part of the quote is important, because it introduces an ambiguity to identity black society is no longer a single, victimized homogeneity of similar thoughts and feelings, moreover, much like the white community that culturally dominates the black community, both comprise of individuals, both misinformed and ignorant. In The Location Of Culture, Homi Bhabha suggests that [s]uch cultures of a postcolonial contra-modernity may be contingent to modernity, discontinuous or in contention with it, resistant to its oppressive, assimilationist technologies; but they also deploy the cultural hybridity of their borderline conditions to translate, and therefore reinscribe, the social imaginary of both metropolis and modernity. Indeed, by deploying cultural hybridity, Griffin sets out to translate and reinscribe the social imaginary of the metropolis. He says that if we did as we claimed, judge each man by his quality as a human individual, my life as a black John Howard Griffin would not be greatly changed, since I was that same human individual, altered only in appearance. He goes on to say: If, on the other hand, we looked at men, saw the mark of pigment, applaud all the false racial and ethnic characteristics, then since I bore that mark, my life would be changed in ways I could not anticipate. As the afterword implies, it is difficult to determine whether Griffin is a white man or a black man in the text.
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