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nancf 's review for:
Black Like Me
by John Howard Griffin
I felt about the same way as I felt the first time I read this book, many years ago as a high school or college student. Griffin's experiences as a black man are demoralizing and discouraging. I admire Griffin for his experiment, never otherwise hiding his identity and facing the reactions of people.
"I saw it not as a white man and not as a Negro, but as a human parent. Their children resembled mine in all ways except the superficial one of skin color, as indeed they resembled all children of all humans. Yet this accident, this least important of all qualities, the skin pigment, marked them for inferior status. It became fully terrifying when I realized that if my skin were permanently black, they would unhesitatingly consign my own children to this bean future." (114)
At the Trapist monastery, where Griffin went for a few days to escape:
"They (the monks) sought to make themselves conform ever more perfectly to God's will, whereas outside I had seen mostly men who sought to make God's will conform to their wretched prejudices." (135)
I didn't recall the Langston Hughes' poem, "Dream Variation" from which the title comes.
Rest at pale evening...
A tall slim tree...
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.
"I saw it not as a white man and not as a Negro, but as a human parent. Their children resembled mine in all ways except the superficial one of skin color, as indeed they resembled all children of all humans. Yet this accident, this least important of all qualities, the skin pigment, marked them for inferior status. It became fully terrifying when I realized that if my skin were permanently black, they would unhesitatingly consign my own children to this bean future." (114)
At the Trapist monastery, where Griffin went for a few days to escape:
"They (the monks) sought to make themselves conform ever more perfectly to God's will, whereas outside I had seen mostly men who sought to make God's will conform to their wretched prejudices." (135)
I didn't recall the Langston Hughes' poem, "Dream Variation" from which the title comes.
Rest at pale evening...
A tall slim tree...
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.