Free English Literature Dissertations - To What Extent Does John Howard Griffin Escape From His Already Held
To what extent does John Howard Griffin escape from his already held assumptions about the meaning of blackness and the meaning of whiteness in Black Like Me?
John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me challenges traditional assumptions of racism in a number of different ways. By becoming a Negro, Griffin himself is subject to various, deep-seated societal abuse from whites and blacks alike, and subsequently, in the text he provides a unique insight into how the racial hypocrisies of the deep South have a profound impact upon the establishment of identity among both black and white cultures of the deep South and New Orleans alike. Eric Lott suggests that ‘The basic paradox’ of people’s attachment to a nation [] is that it is conceived as something inaccessible to the other, but at the same time threatened by it. By drawing ambiguities between his natural identity as a white man and his disguise; his minstrelsy, Griffin challenges and questions his basic assumptions about racial categorisation. Griffin was not unique among white people in having sympathies for the social plight of the Negro, but it was previously assumed, both by Griffin and by the dichotomy drawn between black and white race, that the two were socially and culturally different from one another, and that this rift was irreconcilable. I argue that by crossing that great divide and by becoming the American Other, namely the black man, Griffin helped to humanize the racial divide in America, primarily by introducing ambiguity into deep-seated and unconscious racial stereotyping, both among racists and anti-racists alike. When in Mississippi, subjected to the appalling sceptre of near constant racial abuse, he says: I began to understand Lionel Trilling’s remark that culture learned behaviour patterns so deeply ingrained they produce involuntary reactions is a prison. Indeed, Griffin also has the insight and the sensitivity to realise that he is not exempt from these learned behaviour patterns himself and, by living and experiencing the life of a black man first hand, introduces an ambiguity into the assumptions about whiteness and blackness he previously thought natural. He does this by focussing on the people (white and black) that he meets and by commenting on the personal psychological effects of being black. Although he is, as he says, trapped in the prison of his own white, deep South culture, he attempts to enlighten and change his own assumptions about whiteness and blackness by assuming the appearance of a Negro. In this essay, I will look at how, by filling the grey area between black and white, Griffin attempts to understand and gain an insight into his own (and the more widely held) assumptions about what blackness and whiteness means, both in social and psychological terms.
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