Free English Literature Dissertations - He Begins By Referring To The Negro As A White Man In A Black Disguise: I Sat
He begins by referring to the Negro as a white man in a black disguise: I sat in the monochrome gloom of dusk, scarcely believing that in this year of freedom any man could deprive another of anything so basic as the need to quench thirst or use the restroom. The passage indicates a certain sense of whiteness, as though he is observing the actions of white people from the point of view of a white man. Toward the end of the novel, however, he says that because I was a Negro for six weeks, I remained partly Negro or perhaps essentially Negro. By psychologically remaining Negro, Griffin in part breaks down the unified, homogeneity of race: Richard Dyer suggests that [w]e are often told that we are living now in a world of multiple identities of hybridity, of decentredness and fragmentation. The old illusory unified identities of class, gender, race, sexuality are breaking up; someone may be black and gay and middle class and female; we may be bi-, poly- or non-sexual, of mixed race, indeterminate gender and heaven knows what class. Yet we have not yet reached a situation in which white people and white cultural agendas are no longer in the ascendant. Again, the postcolonial terminology of hybridity is mentioned, which highlights how, by questioning racial stereotyping, by becoming the estranged other, Griffin deconstructs the previous certainties of race, and that is where his journey seems to be truly revelatory. He mentions that I thought it vaguely illuminating that the Negro Griffin’s sweat felt exactly the same to his body as the white Griffin’s. As I had suspected they would be, my discoveries were naïve ones, like those of a child. When he realises psychologically that blackness and whiteness are only determined by a social, cultural and metaphysical dichotomy of inequality, he automatically attacks the previously (subconsciously) held notions that blackness and whiteness are intrinsically different.
Thinking about these things, the bravery of these people attempting to bring up a family decently, their gratitude that none of their children were blind or maimed, their willingness to share their food and shelter with a stranger the whole thing overwhelmed me. I got up from bed, half frozen anyway, and stepped outside.
In being a white man from the deep South of America, it is a seemingly impossible task for Griffin to escape the ideologies and assumptions of race that, even somebody as compassionate as Griffin, is prone to making whether these assumptions are simply an underestimation of the conditions in which black people have to live, or a generalisation of the ways in which black people forge their identities. Griffin’s previous identity as a white man, albeit one with a knowledge of racial matters, automatically places one in opposition, or in support of an abstract political ideology that assumes a sense of distance.
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