Free English Literature Dissertations - I Argue That, By Assuming The Persona Of The American Other, Griffin
I argue that, by assuming the persona of the American Other, Griffin undermines certain heavily ascribed ideological assumptions about whiteness and blackness. By writing unembellished prose, unencumbered with grand ideology, and simply by talking about his own personal experiences and simply documenting the other people he meets, he introduces a notion of ambiguity or hybridity to the question of race. He does this in a number of ways. First, he comments on the sociological implications of blackness and whiteness, concluding that each disparate, separated group both contain good and bad people. He also goes to some length in describing his experiences, these people that he meets. He seems constantly surprised about the variance of how people behave, irrespective of race. Because there are good and bad people on either side of the racial divide, Griffin not only sees a certain hope in a future of racial equality, but sees it in the individuals he has met that are, as he suggests color-blind. Secondly, Griffin explores the impact that being black has on himself. The socio-politico-economical effects of blackness are explored from the point of view of Griffin, who, I believe, gradually changes and becomes darker and more insightful about the subtleties of blackness as the novel develops. His crises with identity that litter the piece help to maintain that there is a glaring rift between whiteness and blackness. This feeling is concentrated to its most intensified degree when he visits Mississippi, and is epitomised by his failure to communicate with the white world he is effectively denied a cultural space to interact, and is testament to the power of knowledge, and of ideological supremacy. In the text, Griffin also experiences the psychological side-effects of being black. This is also important, as it documents how the white man would feel in the societal position of a black man, and offers fresh insights into how a systemic, deeply-engrained spirit of racism and hatred effects Griffin as an individual. Indeed, the social effects are so grave that Griffin is, in the end, forced to leave the country entirely. In Black Like Me, by taking the plunge into darkness, and by describing sociological and psychological racial patterns as opposed to political ones, Griffin enters the grey area between black and white, and in turn dispels the views of racial discrepancy as viewed through the paradigm of dominant white, middle-class, scholarly conduct, discovering instead a hybridity that is simultaneously devastatingly tragic, yet imbued with a certain sense of hope.
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