Black Like Me (27 page)

Some whites, who had never really understood, were offended by this sudden death of their role as the “good white leading the poor black out of the jungle.” Many of these were among the saddest people of our time, good-hearted whites who had dedicated themselves to helping black people become imitation whites, to “bringing them up to our level,” without ever realizing what a deep insult this attitude can be.

White perception of these rapid changes in black concepts lagged. Whites, in general, could not keep up with the progress in black thinking. It was fascinating and tragic to see so many whites who had given long years to civil rights work suddenly excluded from the thinking of black men. Black students were particularly aware that they had to give the black child a view of black men standing on their own, and to erase all hints of the old view of being led by whites. College students formed black student unions and excluded white students. Few white students understood. White college students, after all, had been one of the great bulwarks in the battle for racial justice, and many had dedicated themselves heroically to this cause. But part of that incipient racism had always led whites to assume the leadership positions and perpetuated the view that whites rather than blacks were the heroes of the movement. Really sincere and informed whites were
thanked for what they had done and advised to go and work in their own communities, to combat the racism there which could ultimately be as oppressive to nonracist whites as to blacks. Some did this and continue to do it, though it is perhaps more onerous than working with blacks.

The same principle held in black universities, where students demanded more and more black teachers. White professors who had virtually dedicated their lives and their academic careers as historians, anthropologists, sociologists, to the problems of racism and its cures, thinking they did this for the good of the oppressed victims of racism (and often suffering social and academic insults as a result), were asked to leave schools in favor of black teachers. Some of them turned very bitter.

Some who were eminent authorities in their disciplines, and were recognized as such by black authorities in the same disciplines, were told by students that their work was not relevant because they were not black. To have one’s life’s work dismissed in such a frivolous manner by people who had never yet studied it was a severe insult. One elderly scholar who had been a thundering advocate of civil rights now speaks of “those black punks.” Another, a sociologist, still involved in the study of discrimination in medicine and medical schools, recently told a professor at a California medical school who was proud of the achievement of black medical students there, “Well, I hope when you get sick you call one of
them
.”

Such men, deeply offended to be excluded from participation with black men in the solutions to the problems of racism, sometimes began to look for symptoms of inferiority as a means of self-defense. We are seeing a recrudescence of these contentions by scientists, even to the recent suggestion that men with lower IQs (by white-oriented tests) be paid to have vasectomies - one thousand dollars for each point lower than 100, so that a man with an IQ of 90 would get ten thousand dollars to have himself sterilized. This has been viewed as another example of genocidal thinking.

All of this is part of the current scene. Some people call it polarization, and many of us, white and black, still remember
the days of the early and mid-sixties when we were all working together, singing “We Shall Overcome” and thinking that success was just around the corner.

But now, though we can still bungle into fratricide, there is really more hope than in the past. In the past, hope was based on the moods of the majority - a fragile and slippery basis. That is gone now, and a realism - harsh, full of contradictions - has replaced it as something more solid on which to build, a basis which says that black people will continue to move toward being fully functioning and self-determining people. All this is irreversible.

Polarization. Separation. No one has wanted this, white or black. It has come because the things we dreamed of did not materialize. Many still hold the old dreams even while accepting today’s realities.

A couple of years ago I was seated in an auditorium in Detroit where Reverend Cleage was explaining to a conference of priests that what they called “black separatists” were in reality men who recognized the implacability of a white-imposed separation.

Afterward, one of the priests got up and asked: “But aren’t you advocating an un-Christian way - the way of accepting as a reality this white-imposed separation? You are a minister. Are not all of us who are ministers obligated to bring men together in love?”

“Yes,” Reverend Cleage said. “And because you have not preached that long enough and loudly enough, we are faced with accepting the separation.”

Eventually, some black thinkers believe, this “separation” may be the shortest route to an authentic communication at some future date when blacks and whites can enter into encounters in which they truly speak as equals and in which the white man will no longer load every phrase with unconscious suggestions that he has something to “concede” to black men or that he wants to help black men “overcome” their blackness.

I
n
Black Like Me
, I tried to establish one simple fact, which was to reveal the insanity of a situation where a man is judged by his skin color, by his philosophical “accident” - rather than by who he is in his humanity.

I think I proved that, because as a white man I could go anywhere freely; but as a black man I was restricted by segregation laws and Southern white customs. I was judged entirely by my pigmentation and not by my qualities as a human individual.

This simple fact was indisputable, yet many whites did not seem to comprehend this, or were unwilling to accept the truth, or flatly denied it. My experience as a “Negro” merely substantiated an experiential truth known by all black people and all persons of color universally - that white majority cultures discriminate against minorities solely on the basis of skin color.

This system of discrimination, an inculcated double standard, may vary in content from culture to culture, but it is always unjust. There are thousands of kinds of injustice but there is only one kind of justice - equal justice for all. To call for a little more justice, or a moderately gradual sort of justice, is to call for no justice. That is a simple truth.

And there is another simple truth: Humanity does not differ in any profound way; there are
not
essentially different species of human beings. If we could only put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustice of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice.

Having recognized the depths of my own prejudices when I first saw my black face in the mirror, I was grateful to discover that within a week as a black man the old wounds were healed and all the emotional prejudice was gone. It had disappeared for the simple reason that I was staying in the homes of black families and I was experiencing at the emotional level, for the first time in thirty-nine years, what I had known intellectually for a long time. I was seeing that in families everything is the same for all people.

This was revealed in conversations about what to have for supper and how to pay the bills; about which child should help with the dishes and which should clear the table. It was revealed
in the most obvious ways in which people in all families relate with each other. It was revealed in sitting with black parents and seeing that they responded to frustration as all human parents do. I was experiencing all this as a
human parent
and it was exactly as I experienced my own children.

The emotional garbage I had carried all of those years - the prejudice and the denial, the shame and the guilt - was dissolved by understanding that the
Other
is not other at all.

All human beings face the same fundamental problems of loving and of suffering, of striving toward human aspirations for themselves and their children, of simply being and inevitably dying. These are the basic truths in all people, the common denominators of all cultures and all races and all ethnic categories.

In reality, the Us-and-Them or I-and-Thou dichotomies do not exist. There is only one universal
We
- one human family united by the capacity to feel compassion and to demand equal justice for all.

I believe that before we can truly dialogue with one another we must first perceive intellectually, and then at the profoundest emotional level, that there is no
Other
- that the
Other
is simply
Oneself
in all the significant essentials.

This alone is the key that can unlock the prison of culture. It will neutralize the poisons of the stereotype that allow men to go on benevolently justifying their abuses against humanity.

(2011)

by Robert Bonazzi

Fifty years ago John Howard Griffin embarked upon his 1959 journey through the Deep South disguised as a Negro. He risked a bold experiment based upon a simple but provocative premise never before tested. His intention was to experience daily life as a black laborer and to keep a journal with absolute truthfulness, even if his discoveries proved to be prejudicial, embarrassing or naive. His honesty was tested the very first time he looked at the mirror to examine his disguise. There he perceived “the face and shoulders of a stranger—a fierce, bald, very dark Negro” glaring back at him.

This powerful passage from
Black Like Me
reads like a loss of identity scene in a modern literary novel, but it was not fiction. Within that illuminated instant, his sense of self—physical, mental, emotional—had been thrown into chaos. But who had glared at whom? Was he the dark face reflected in the glass or the white consciousness reflecting upon it? Soon he realized he was both “the observing one and the one who panicked…” Griffin had projected his deepest fears onto the mirror, causing him to deny the truth of what he had witnessed. The emotional prejudice that intellect had long rationalized was exposed by his unexpected reaction of antipathy. “The worst of it was that I could feel no companionship for this new person. I did not like the way he looked,” he writes. “But the thing was done and there was no possibility of turning back.”

The stranger in the mirror was none other than the
Other
—that threatening mask of the stereotype that every culture affixes upon the face of every other culture. Griffin had encountered the
Other
-as-Self, coming face-to-face with his own unconscious racism. Initially he denied the truth he had witnessed, rationalizing it as the shock of recognition—even though it was his
lack
of recognition that truly startled him. However, from that transforming encounter emerged a unique double perspective, perceiving clearly the bias projected on his darkened skin by whites and the reality of racism known by Negroes. While he could never plumb the depths of experience that only black people can know, he was exposed for several weeks to the insane hatred of racial discrimination.
Griffin delivered over 1,200 lectures to mostly-white student audiences. He encouraged them to repudiate the bigotry of earlier generations and envisioned in them the hope of healing the white community and the future of a peaceful, desegregated society. The core concept in Griffin’s writings about racism—that members of dominant groups tend to view minorities, because they
seem different
in some extrinsic way, as
intrinsically other
, and “as merely underdeveloped versions of their own imprisoning culture”—was intuited in
Black Like Me
and articulated in a seminal essay, “The Intrinsic Other” (1966).

In that essay Griffin examines this inculcated attitude and clarifies the fallacies inherent in the racist viewpoint. “One of the characteristics of our expression of such attitudes is that they are often perfectly natural to the speaker and unnatural to the hearer. They reveal in the speaker the falsity of viewing others as intrinsically
Other
, intrinsically different as men. This intrinsic difference always implies some degree of inferiority.”

Prejudices are taught directly or indirectly by elders but we are all submerged in the inculcation process. This unconscious environment of communication in which we are imprisoned blinds our perceptions to institutionalized racism. We tend to deny that racism exists in this new century, but our denial perpetuates the systemic process. “Implicit in this process,” Griffin writes, “is a consent to racism.” He cites the Irish jurist Edmund Burke for providing the “touchstone of this error when he said: ‘I know of no way to draw up an indictment against a whole people.’ Racism begins when we draw up an indictment against a whole people merely by considering them as a whole underdeveloped versions of ourselves, by perpetuating the blindness of the stereotype.”

After the publication of
Black Like Me
in 1961, Griffin was asked the same question persistently: Why had he done such a thing? He thought the question irrelevant, pointing out that it was a question black people
never
asked. Nonetheless, he attempted to answer it by saying: “If I could take on the skin of a black man, live whatever might happen and then share that experience with others, perhaps at the level of shared human experience, we might come to some understanding that was not possible at the level of
pure reason.”