John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961)

On October 2, 1959, John Howard Griffin made his first diary entry, the first of many that would then go on to form the content of his book Black Like Me. These recounted Griffin’s experience as a white American novelist, going undercover in the Deep South to “authentically” report what it was like to “experience discrimination based on skin color, something over which one has no control”. After having taken oral medication for skin pigmentation, and subjecting himself to ultraviolet rays, cutting his hair so that he would look “slick” for the women, and shaving the fair hairs from his hands, he set off, alone, down South.

Black Like Me is composed of a series of journalistic entries, during which the reader is positioned within an intimate ethos frame with the writer. The book as a whole is never static, it moves as Griffin moves, whether he is on a bus, hitchhiking, walking down alleyways in search for a bathroom that coloured people were permitted to use, or even carrying out the simple action of shoe shining. He is forever in motion throughout the narrative. A narrative that emphasizes the bigotry of the white man, and the kind and welcoming nature of the black man.

As readers, however, where does our empathy actually lie? Griffin was a white man “imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom [he] felt no kinship”. Indeed, on November 7, he looked at himself in the mirror for the first time after his transformation. He felt loneliness, and distress. He then began his journey disguised as a black man, wondering the streets in search for new experiences.

Personal narratives of black individuals often evoke a sympathetic reaction in a white audience. However, with Griffin constantly emphasizing the existence, and consequently the difference, of the “two men” in his body, does the reader still feel this way?

Does his transformation imply a wider gap between the white and the black individual, or a smaller one? We have a white author, deceiving the Southern world to “get a story”, manipulating individuals and treating them as if they were animals on which it was perfectly normal to experiment. On the other hand, we have a dedicated journalist who goes to great lengths in order to provide the white reader with something as truthful as possible, in the hope of raising awareness of the damaging effects of segregation.

A white man posing as a black man does not, and can not, understand the extent to which segregation has damaged humanity; he does not understand the anger and pain that come with hundreds of years of slavery and inhumane treatment. Discrimination has far deeper roots than anything that could possibly be imagined, nor rectified by a book like this. I applaud his efforts, as I believe they are benign and good-hearted, but I feel that the book is patronising as a whole, and does not even begin to cover what, or how, the black individual felt, and in part still feels today.

Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices

Wright once asked: “Could words be weapons?” 12 Million Black Voices shows that they definitely could. It is, in fact, a work about the unsung stories and living conditions more hardly felt by the African American communities that suffered extensively during the Great Depression. In writing in first person plural, Wright’s use of “we” and “us” not only emphasizes a certain collectiveness within itself, but it also makes a point of referring to his “us” as whole, ignoring all further divisions within the group, thus creating a feeling of community and belonging.

Initially, I thought that the collective voice evoked an air of authenticity, considering that he had combined his words with explicit and self-explanatory photographs that aided the reader in relating to the cause. There is an interesting juxtaposition between his eloquent mode of expression, with his use of words such as “adroitly”, “covenants” and “hence”, and his wide argument of deprivation. Therefore, to what extent are his experience and account of events actually authentic?

Having said this, Margaret Bourke-White writes “Whatever facts a person writes have to be coloured by his prejudice and bias. With a camera, the shutter opens and closes and the only rays that come in to be registered come directly from the object in front of you”. So is objectivity actually possible if photography is involved? Trachtenberg argues that “American photographs are not simple descriptions but constructions, that the history they show is inseparable from the history they enact: a history of photographers employing their medium to make sense of their society”. There are always two sides to one story, and the issue of authenticity has been at the centre of critical debates for centuries. The way in which we analyse objectivity is, in fact, subjective. There is no right or wrong, there is no way of knowing what has been tampered with before being shown to the public, and what has not.

We associate veracity of facts with emotion. 12 Million Black Voices was clearly written for white readership, awakening their consciousness with shocking words, and enforcing those words with images. Edwin Seaver declared on a 1941 radio program: “I know of no other book that brings home as clearly to the white reader what it means to be black in our country”. The issue at hand is that “we”, have become desensitized towards words and pictures as separate entities. Wright’s combination of them, however, is capable of assuming a documentary style that mimics that of a film, therefore it is easier for the reader to relate and intake the emotions behind the words, as they are laid out explicitly in a visual way.