Essays on Black Like Me

Book Review

Introduction Black Like me is a unique nonfictional book that has the author as the main character. Motivated by the socio-political dynamics John Howard Griffin take a bold but unusual step. He sets out to explore the experience of the Black people, but he could not just find it in books. The central themes to be dealt with in this review include racial profiling by the judicial system and the baseless segregation of the blacks. John frustration takes him to Mansfield in Texas. Black like me is Griffin’s own story while coexisting with the black community. The book ...

Introduction

Clarence Thomas is the second African American to sit on the United States Supreme Court, preceded only by Thurgood Marshall who served on the United States Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991. Clarence Thomas was nominated to the United States Supreme Court in July 1991 and was approved by the United States Senate by a very narrow margin in October of 1991. Throughout his term on the United States Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has been both hailed and criticized. He has been both compared to Thurgood Marshall and nicknamed an Uncle Tom. Throughout this paper, I will discuss United States ...

John Howard Griffin in his now famous book Black Like Me discusses the issue of racial injustice and is deeply frustrated by his inability, as a white man, to understand what the blacks were experiencing. The book reveals how the author took radical steps to darken his skin in order to look like an African-American. Griffin set out to investigate the cultures and way of life of the African-Americans. Specifically, he set out to know whether the African-Americans suffered from racism and how it affected their day-to-day lives. Griffin was greatly offended by the fact that racism and segregation were ...

The southern states of the United States have been dealing with racism for a very long time. To understand racism from a black person's perspective, John Howard Griffin decided to darken his skin and live as a black man in the south. "Black Like Me" themes were racism, the lack of unity among black people, the use of religion for protection against racism, and the role of the media in presenting racism to the public. While Griffin was able to resume life as a white man, many of his experience with racism from a black man's point of view stayed with him for life. ...

The movie Malcolm X (1992) is a seminal cinematic work by the director Spike Lee. The film portrays the journey of Malcolm as he transforms as a man, delving deep into his racial and ethnic identity in the society. One of the best attributes of the film is the director’s achievement in the portraiture of Malcolm’s progression of thinking. The audience can very well comprehend the chronology of incidents and reasoning that led to his stance on the issue of racism. Malcolm faced a lot in life right from a tender age. His father, a minister, was killed, in all probability ...

The idea upon which John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me” is based had haunted him for several years until he finally started writing the book. For many years Griffin had wondered that if a white man became a black, what kind of changes in his life he would have to make. He basically wanted to get a firsthand perspective of the everyday life of the black minority. John Howard Griffin, who was born white, actually medically altered his skin tone to become black. Griffin’s book is an autobiographical account, a memoir of his personal experience during the ten months after artificially ...

Black like me

Plato, one of the most famed philosophy, reiterated that it is only in the light of justice that we can be able to truly define the real measure of an individual’s view; whether it existed or not. He further reflected that the non-existence of justice is the non-existence of what defines one as a man. This statement manages to capture what author Griffin faced during his self imposed experiment. In addition, the saying covers the widespread racial discrimination when he was writing his book; black like me. During this time, justice was a mirage to the black community in the ...