White To Black Like Me Analysis

White to Black, Black to White “The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence”(Griffin, 10). Despite on the level of reading, any reader will be hooked Black Like Me a nonfiction. The reader will learn the story of John Howard Griffin a while male living in Mansfield, Texas, in 1959 who begins to wonder what it is like to an African-American in the South during the segregation period. He gets the brilliant idea to transform into a black male but only tells a few people. He begins his journey by traveling by plane to New Orleans, Louisiana, on November 1, 1959. He realizes that he is in one of the cities that are nice to Negros, therefore, he decides to travel to Mississippi, and Alabama to complete his study. One night John Griffin is sitting in his office at his parent's farm and the idea that persisted came back that autumn night after reading a report that he read. “If a white man became a Negro in the Deep South, what adjustments would he have to make? What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin color, something over which one has no control” (Griffin, 1)? Griffin met with George Levitan the owner of Sepia, a magazine for the Negro, to explain his idea and persuades Levitan into agreeing to include an article on his study and to pay the expenses, in which he succeeds. “After some time he stepped back into the room and said they had all agreed we should attempt it with a medication taken orally, followed by the exposure to ultraviolet rays. …show more content…
He explained they used it on victims of vitiligo, a disease that causes white spots to appear on the face and body” (Griffin, 6). As soon as he arrives in New Orleans he visits with a dermatologist and informs him of his plan, the doctor thinks the idea is crazy but agrees to his proposal. During his visits with the dermatologist, he also stops at shops and interacts with the same people (one who is a black shoe shiner named Sterling Williams) over a period of four days. Once he completes his transformation, he sets out into the African-American community. To his surprise, he is overwhelmed by how fast he accepted by other blacks he comes across. He even becomes friends with Sterling Williams lets him in on his secret and is even guided by him to help him to be a negro. As a black man, he feels accepted in the African-American community and shunned upon the white community. Of course, he does not stay New Orleans long he also travels to different parts of Mississippi and Alabama. Throughout his experiment, he is able to experience the difficulties a black man has endure just to find the basic necessities such as food, shelter, and even the restroom. He even learns that although “God made the Negro dark as a curse” white men often seek out to sleep with women (Griffin, 137). From the day Griffin became black he learned to sympathize and hurt as one even when transitioned between black and white in Alabama. As someone who did not live through this era, I’m not able to fully able to sympathize or agree with either side for the reason that it more seen as the norm. Yes, African-Americans were viewed to be as donkey because they