Black Like Me Analysis
“Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin is more of a story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a sense of the dual roles he had to endure for his studies. He was plagued by an undying need to understand racial division and suffrage. With his insatiable need to understand, he took on two personalities. First, to begin his test he became black by taking oral medications and ultraviolet like treatments to change his pigment. He moved to Louisiana to test the waters. This is where his story begins. This long proverbial road he traveled to understand why people acted the way that they do from racial ignorance was where he ran into multiple personalities on both sides of the spectrum.
As a black man, Mr. Griffin experienced dilapidated and defeated black
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Griffin begins to alternate between black and white, visiting the same people under different faces. His findings are just what he imagined they would be. The same white people that treated him with contempt and violence before as a black man, now under white face treated him with kindness and generosity. They were respectful and unbiased. The blacks that welcomed him as a black man, of course, treated him with distrust and distain as a white man.
With this successful experiment, Mr. Griffin found what are to be multiple personalities amongst the two races. They were kind and generous with their own race; yet took on a more condemning and prejudice attitude while he was the opposite race. While even by Mr. Griffin’s own statements, he felt uncomfortable in his own skin, losing himself in character.
In my opinion, John Griffin was ultimately brave enduring this experiment. He proved that this world had so much to learn, especially in the American South. Everyone is guilty at some point of prejudice. We all have a different face that we may wear when interacting with human beings outside of our own race. This is where Mr. Griffin’s entire point to his experiment hits home. Human beings deserve to be treated fairly, by all. Exclude the double standards and multiple personalities we are all guilty of
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