John Howard Griffin

Character Analysis

John Howard Griffin, or at least the guy he describes himself as in Black Like Me, is either one of the bravest or stupidest guys we've ever heard of. We guess back then people didn't know how much it sucked to be black in the pre-civil-rights American South, but it seems pretty obvious to us now. Didn't they see Roots? Maybe they didn't get it on Netflix.

Anyway, there's not much that we get to know about this guy through his book. He doesn't talk very much about himself, since he is so focused on telling us about the black experience. All we know is how Griffin feels during the experiment, and most of his emotions are fear and anger. We don't know Griffin before the experiment or after it. But what we do get to know tells us a lot about his character.

Not The Hero

For one thing, Griffin is not the hero here. We don't know if there is a hero, but sure ain't Griffin.

You would imagine that a guy who would take on this kind of project would be some kind of black rights activist. Or at the very least, that he likes black people. Neither of those seems to be the case for Griffin.

He tells us that as a white man, he would see black people living in poverty or working terrible jobs and he would assume that they either liked it that way, or could do nothing else. He even tells us that during the experiment he actively looked for bad things to say about black people: "I have held no brief for the Negro. I have looked diligently for all aspects of 'inferiority' among them and I cannot find them" (15.115). Yeah, not exactly a civil-rights proponent.

Instead of doing it to be a hero, we think that Griffin does the experience just because he's curious. He wants to know the truth. Remember that he's a journalist: those guys can't help themselves when they smell a good story. His journalism-senses were definitely tingling when he read the article on increased Southern African-American suicide on October 28 (1.3). But white people said that black people love the South. Who was telling the truth? That's what Griffin wants to find out.

So no heroes here. Just a really really curious journalist looking for the truth.

Traumatized

Griffin isn't "down." We're pretty sure he doesn't actually feel solidarity with black people. Nope, that's not why he gets so into the equal rights deal. He's just freaked out by how people treat him when the only thing that's changed is the color of his skin.

Don't believe us? Look at his own words! He says:

Then the onrush of revulsion, the momentary flash of blind hatred against the whites who were somehow responsible for all of this, the old bewilderment of wondering, "'Why do they do it? Why do they keep us like this? What are they gaining? What evil has taken them?"' (10.242)

Notice that Griffin doesn't say them, he says us. It's a personal attack. Before he was black, it was just about "those black people," and so he felt differently. But now that he's changed the color of his skin, he feels prejudice keenly.

Would he have felt this way without the experiment? We're doubtful. Does it change how important it was for the black community to have voices like his speak against racism? Not at all.

But now that he passes as a black man, Griffin feels enough prejudice to become traumatized. It's pretty obvious, what with the nightmares and all. He describes them like this:

White men and women, their faces stern and heartless, closed in on me. The hate stare burned through me. I pressed back against a wall. I could expect no pity, no mercy. They approached slowly and I could not escape them. Twice before, I had awakened myself screaming. (15.126)

And it's not just while he's black; he has this nightmare even after he goes back to being white.

But what's the big deal about having a bad dream once in a while? We have a recurring dream where we forgot to study for an Algebra test and we're naked: brrrr.

These nightmares, though, have a special significance. Throughout the book Griffin tries to get us to feel his emotions, just like we were doing the experiment right alongside him. By telling us about these horrible nightmares he really shows us a vulnerable part of his experience. Nearly everyone can identify with the terror they feel during a nightmare (we're getting cold sweats thinking about that naked Algebra test) so by sharing his dream-life with us, Griffin is directly communicating his fear.

Family Man

Besides being your regular "not-racist but not-not-racist" white guy, Griffin is a family man. It's a big deal that he's leaving his wife and kids for six weeks, and it seems like his close relationship with his family is one of the biggest ways that he is able to understand how terrible life is for black people. The scenes with black families and children are the ones that really seem to hit him hard. Maybe he could take the abuse, but imagining his wife or children in the same situation just eats him up inside.

When he is hitchhiking his way across the South, Griffin ends up staying with a black family and plays with their children. Before this, we only see him talking to adults, and it seems like this interaction with kids really gets to him. He says:

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 mean future. (15.111)

Maybe other people would be moved by the terrible living situation of the children and their family. But what makes it "fully terrifying" for Griffin is the idea that his children could have very easily been in the same position.

We've said it before and we'll say it again; Griffin is totally selfish about the whole antiracism deal. He constantly has to imagine how much it would suck if white people were treated like black people.

Family is a big issue for Griffin, but it's probably also a way to tug at the heartstrings of the white reader and humanize black people. It's like, come on, babies are babies! How can you hate babies? And they're just like your babies! You wouldn't want this to happen to them, would you?

Ex-Choir Boy

What if God was one of us?  If it was the 1950s God would probably be chilling out with civil-rights leaders, according to Griffin. God—or rather Christianity—makes a lot of appearances in this book, which is both surprising and not so surprising. It's surprising because nowadays we don't think of religion too much when we think about racism. But it's not surprising because religion was a big issue in the civil-rights movement. Come on, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. doesn't have that reverend before his name for nothing.

We're not too surprised by Griffin's preoccupation with religion either. After all, one of the novels that he wrote before Black Like Me basically takes place inside of a monastery.  He even had a religious revelation as a young guy, and became a member of the Carmelite Church as an adult.

So it's because of this fervent Christian belief that Griffin contemplates spending a night in a church rather than a motel:

Dreading the thought of spending another night in some cheap hotel if I could not get a room at the Y, I considered hiding in the church and sleeping there in one of the pews. The idea appealed to me so strongly I had to cast it off by force. (8.151)

Sure, it doesn't have any amenities, but who needs those? Plus, you know how cheap motels always have weirdly translucent washcloths and towels—what's up with that?

Remember what we said before about pulling on people's heartstrings? Well, religion is a pretty good way to make you feel guilty or at least appeal to your better nature. Griffin has a long conversation with a black man about religion, where the man says:

"They're God's children, just like us," he said. "Even if they don't act very godlike any more. God tells us straight—we've got to love them, no ifs, ands, and buts about it." (13.121)

That's a great way to show that black people have morals, and pretty high ones at that. We guess that a white reader might feel guilty in the face of that kind of reasoning and at least try to act differently.

A Journalist

Like we said before, we don't really know much about John Howard Griffin based on the book. He's not really a character, and he doesn't really delve into his own psyche. But this isn't a novel. This is investigative journalism. He's here to report the facts… and that's exactly what he does in Black Like Me.