Black Like Me Tone

Personal, Not Combative, Depressed/Terrified

Personal

Black Like Me is not your everyday scientific or journalistic article. It's full of emotion, imagery, sadness, and even fear. At the time, Griffin's blunt descriptions of the horrors that he sees and his confidential tone shocked his readers.

Think about it. You're used to reading abstract scientific studies on the state of black people. Then one day while reading you come across a line like this:

I had tampered with the mystery of existence and I had lost the sense of my own being. This is what devastated me. The Griffin that was had become invisible. (7.15)

Wouldn't you be surprised? That's not an abstract person. That's a very real person, with very real feelings.

Non-Combative

Not only is the text different because it's very personal, it's also different because it's non-combative. Aside from the scientific articles with their cold and rational reasoning, most of the personal texts available at the time were probably written from a combative point of view.

They condemned white people for slavery and racism. These weren't sweet little biographies. The authors of other personal texts were angry and they wanted justice.

Griffin's text is not a call to arms for black people, and it doesn't demand that racists be punished. More than anything else, it seems that Griffin just wants peace and equality. Not violence or retribution.

This part of Griffin's tone is more of a negative than positive attribute. It's more what he doesn't say than what he does. But here's one moment where you can really see Griffin's pacifism at work:

The Negro who turns now, in the moment of near-realization of his liberties, and bares his fangs at a man's whiteness, makes the same tragic error the white racist has made. (38.10)

In other words, he doesn't want black people to do to white people what racists have done to them. He wants them to take the high road.

Depressed/Terrified

We don't know about you guys, but we were pretty sad by the end of this book. After such a barrage of hatred, it's easy to feel like nothing will ever improve between black and white people. Not only that, the descriptions of the prejudice that Griffin experiences, especially the late-night ones where his life is in danger, are terrifying and made our hearts beat a little faster with fear.

We get the feeling that this is not just some kind of fancy literary technique, but actually what Griffin was feeling at the time. For example, this is how he describes the "hate stare":

Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: "What in God's name are you doing to yourself?" (10.57)

He feels sick, terrified, horrified, and overall disappointed his fellow man. In a way, this is even worse than being angry. You know, like when your parents tell you that they're "disappointed in you," and it's worse than if they were just angry?

In the same way, Griffin's depressed and terrified feeling is almost more of a guilt trip than if he had been angry with his fellow white man.