Have you read Black Like Me - everyone should read it

[malaise]

https://www.westada.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=3789&dataid=100147&FileName=blacklikeme_TEXT.pdf

[Ohiogal]

1. Yep. Excellent.

I was actually assigned to read this book in a High School English class. It’s been many years .... ... I should read it again

Thanks for the suggestion, malaise

[panader0]

2. Yes. Back about '69 as part of a Black History course in college.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_Me

[Canoe52]

3. Yes back a half century or so. Great book, eye opening!

[livetohike]

4. Yes. Back in high school (1967-1970). I need to read

it again .

[grantcart]

5. Great book

Now I can't help think about E Murphy's brilliant SNL skit " White like me" whenever I am reminded of the book.

[sop]

6. Groundbreaking book at the time.

Sadly, in today's climate of cultural hyper-sensitivity, Griifin would be attacked and shamed for putting on blackface.

[JHB]

14. I don't think the main thrust of the crticism would be "hypersensitivity" so much as...

"People have been telling you these things for a long time.

A great number of people have been telling you their experiences, the reality they live in, in many ways and for decades.

Why not just believe them?"


And it's not just a "today" thing. The 1986 movie Soul Man was criticized for the "skin darkening and POOF! Black" of its lead character.

[sop]

19. At the time I remember mild criticism that Griffin failed to fully understand blacks' experiences

with racial discrimination by merely darkening his skin for a short time. Griffin was the first to admit he was only trying to convey the sensation of racism from the perspective of a white man, it wasn't meant to be anything more than that. His account did raise awareness, and the debate was productive.

In recent years, in certain settings, I've heard strong criticism of the book from people who simply feel that any white person who even attempts something like this, no matter how intended, is guilty of "putting on blackface." I'm of the opinion this borders on hyper-sensitivity, but not being black, I suspect I can't really understand.

[tavernier]

7. It has stayed with me for the sixty years since I read it.

Very few books have affected me in that way.

I’ve heard negative things about the content, author, depiction etc. since reading it, plenty of criticism from blacks and whites. But it was an eye opening read to this white, midwestern, teenage girl raised in the fifties and sixties.

[TruckFump]

21. Same here.

Read it in the mid 60s when I was in H.S. Not a H.S. English assignment, but because I was curious.

Same reaction as you had -- eye opening to a white teen-aged girl who had been raised in the mid-west in the 1950s and early 1960s.

[TreasonousBastard]

8. I did. I was in high school at the time, a couple of years after it came out...

It was shocking to see how the world changed for Griffin. It was a completely different America he saw.

Two other things in real life got to me back in the 60s...

My mother had hired a cleaning woman to help out as my father was dying. Georgia was nobody's fool and became the person my mother trusted for valuable and personal things to be kept safe. She announced one day that she was going back South to work the fields again. "Why would you do that?" "Because down there, as bad as it is, I know where I stand. Nobody's jerking my chain with empty words."

Another time I was in a small shop out on the East End of Long Island and the woman in front of me actually started bowing and scraping telling me I should go ahead of her. I assumed she was one of the field hands brought up to work the local farms and it brought home more than news reports how the entire culture of the South was based on a deep and fundamental apartheid.

[malaise]

13. Unbelievable

Man to man is so unjust

[LastDemocratInSC]

9. My 10th grade biology teacher made the book required reading.

That was in the late 1960s.

[malaise]

11. Biology teacher - amazing

Funny how rational thinking was respected in the 60s

[PCIntern]

10. He spoke at my school just before he died

I believe he had a syndrome due to the material which darkened his skin.

[malaise]

12. Did not know that

He was a genuine revolutionary

[LizBeth]

15. Yes and left such an impression had one advance kid read at 8 and the other a little older.

[ChazII]

16. Wow! It's good to see that it was

required reading back in the 70's. My class (class of 72) was required to read it, too.

[malaise]

18. Yep we were much more open back then

Amazing indeed

[bobbieinok]

17. Yes. Read it in college my senior yr (61). Blew me away!

Something that r es ally stuck with me---he wrote blacks kept saying how badly they were treated. He wanted to see for himself, 6o see if that was really true.

Montgomery Bus Boycott was in 55, sit-ins started the spring of 60, Freedom Rides started in spring of 61.

[safeinOhio]

20. I read it back in the 60s and it made a big impression on me.

I looked on Amazon a while back and only used copies were for sale, so it must be out of print. I found that a shame.

[planetc]

22. I read it in college, and then heard the author speak.

It's possible he was on a book tour when I and some other women from my college went to hear him speak in Rochester, NY. At the end of his talk, there was an enthusiastic wave of applause. This caused him to warn us that everything we deplored about the treatment of African Americans in the south was happening also within five miles of where we were gathered. This comment of Mr. Griffin's has stuck with me ever since. It was my first warning that all the racists did not live south of the Mason Dixon line, but are distributed throughout the country. It matters not whether we vote for racists, because we all participate in the society built by ancient and modern racists. Let's rebuild the society.