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John Howard GriffinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Content Warning: This section of the study guide contains detailed discussions of racism and violence motivated by racism, including references to lynching and suicide. The source material includes outdated and offensive racial terms and slurs, which are reproduced in this guide only via quotations.
The psychological effects of discrimination are obvious from the moment that Griffin steps into the world with dark skin, and they increase in severity as the days and weeks go on. Griffin experiences these effects firsthand and observes them in many of the people he meets. He mentions early in his memoir that suicidality was high among Black Americans during the 1950s due to a sense of hopelessness that pervaded the community as a result of segregation and racism. This legally sanctioned racial hierarchy in the United States established a divide between Black and white Americans, particularly as many white people refused to alter their views or actions as the fight for civil rights came to the fore.
Griffin was not prepared for the emotional and mental effects he would experience while living under segregation. He describes the impact of being on the receiving end of the n-word, which “leaps out with electric clarity” (25), as well other slurs, insults, and assaults to dignity, such as the “hate stares” that follow him and Black people wherever they go. He becomes unable to recognize himself, feeling distanced and isolated from his family and the world, and powerless to change his situation. Small gestures of kindness, or even just a lack of hatred, become a source of comfort for Griffin: “I told them good night and returned to my room, less lonely, and warmed by the brief contact with others like me who felt the need to be reassured that an eye could show something besides suspicion or hate” (21). He walks miles to meet basic needs at times, and countless people treat him as if he isn’t there, while others sexually objectify him. While Griffin does not literally become a Black man, his psyche is altered as a result of people perceiving him as Black. By the time he allows his skin to return to its natural color and is instantly afforded his old privileges and freedoms, he can no longer appreciate them and is plagued with guilt, shame, and anger.
Over time, Griffin starts to doubt his purpose and his project and the potential for change in the South. His visit to Atlanta renews his sense of hope when he sees the promise of the people and government there. After publishing his work, Griffin experiences a different form of discrimination when white people view his actions as a threat to the status quo and an attack on their beliefs. Griffin is threatened and harassed and eventually forced to move out of his home in Texas.
The illusion of inherent differences among races is a fundamental factor underlying racism and racist systems, such as segregation. This illusion is underscored by the completely opposing experiences that Griffin had while walking the streets while changing only his skin color. When Griffin leaves the dermatologist before beginning his project, the doctor tells him, “Now you go into oblivion” (15). The dermatologist’s ominous statement speaks to the alienation and divide between the two groups during the 1950s in the South. Many see desegregation as an attack on American values or a push toward communism, but in truth, segregation was the attack.
Griffin’s direct experiences with discrimination are, he finds, vastly different from simply reading about it or witnessing it as a passerby: “It was the ghetto. I had seen them before from the high altitude of one who could look down and pity. Now I belonged here and the view was different” (22). He is gawked and glared at simply for looking at a white woman directly on the bus and feels immense pressure not to give up his seat for fear that it will represent submission. While hitchhiking, Griffin is stereotyped and questioned about his genitalia and sexual habits by multiple men. On the other hand, Griffin is also inspired and surprised by the sense of community that seems doubly empowered by discrimination. Black people know they must help one another if they are to survive.
Griffin is also stunned by the hospitality and warmth that so many people provide him, inviting a stranger into their homes to spend a safe night. It is while staying with one such family that Griffin thinks of his own children and notes that there is no true difference between his own children and the ones sharing a room in the small house by the swamp. He comes to understand that anyone could end up in a similar position if treated this way long enough:
You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and less leisure, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don’t spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man’s conditioning (89).
Through his experiment, Griffin concludes that the supposed “differences” between Black and white Americans are socially constructed, the result of—by the 1950s—hundreds of years of discrimination that prevented access to education, financial opportunities, and other advantages available to white people.
Justice and morality are directly intertwined—there cannot be one without the other. During the era of the civil rights movement while Griffin was living in the deep South, the relationship between these two becomes clear. Griffin has several conversations with Black men who comment on the lack of justice for people like them. Griffin observes that Black people are treated as the lowest possible form of human: “All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy—that the Negro is treated not even as a second-class citizen, but as a tenth-class one” (47). He sees irony in the way that Southern people act so decently to one another, almost to the point of being outlandish, but cannot be bothered to treat Black people with even half the amount of respect. When the Mack Charles Parker lynching occurs, Griffin sees the way that an injustice against one Black man is in actuality an injustice against all Black folks: “[T]heir faces were pinched, their expressions indrawn as though they felt themselves being dragged down the jail stairway, felt their own heads bumping against the steps” (64). This is not unlike modern times, where incidents of police brutality have led to mass protests. Parker was not given the fair trial that every American is supposed to have the right to, and he was not considered innocent until proven guilty.
Justice is not only a matter of criminal law; it also extends to the rights afforded to all American people, and there is an obvious lack of justice and morality when people do not receive basic rights based on the color of their skin. Griffin finds it difficult to cope with the reality that the children he meets in the family of eight are likely to have a limited future: “His children’s lives would henceforth be restricted, their world smaller, their educational opportunities less, their future mutilated” (110). Griffin meets a man on the beach who complains that Black people have to pay taxes for beach maintenance but are not allowed to use them, highlighting the unjust taxation to which Black southerners were subjected.
Griffin ends his memoir with a note on injustice, arguing that injustice against Black people harms the entire country: “So long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability, all real peace, all trust in man’s good intentions toward his fellow man” (153). Justice can only exist when truth is known and understood, which is why Griffin’s friend, P.D., works on behalf of justice by exposing the truth and reporting fairly and why Griffin himself is driven to publish his experiences.
Human identity is complex, ever-changing, and influenced by a host of factors. During his time living as a Black man, Griffin learns that his identity is not as concrete as he once believed and is in many ways dependent on the way society views and treats him. Initially, upon darkening his skin, Griffin looks in the mirror and is shocked by what he sees. He does not recognize himself and feels like someone else completely. The feeling is uncomfortable and unfamiliar, and Griffin finds that he does not like what he sees, not because he is racist, but because he already has an idea of what he will experience. He describes himself as being “born old at midnight into a new life” and attempts to live through his project without personal baggage or bias as much as possible (16). Griffin even distinguishes between the “white Griffin” and the “Negro Griffin” (17), feeling as though they are two different people.
When Griffin confesses his intent to Sterling and begins to navigate Black society, Sterling almost immediately forgets that Griffin is not Black and talks to him as he would any other friend. In turn, Griffin starts to adopt the language and accent of the Black people he associates with, as well as their attitudes as he experiences more and more of their world. The more that Griffin experiences discrimination and slurs from white people, is refused basic needs and services, and is unable to find work, the more that he starts to see himself as inferior—the very way he is being treated. He finds that he cannot separate his personal feelings and experiences from the experiment, because everything that has happened to him has been such an immense psychological shock: “I had begun this experiment in a spirit of scientific detachment. I wanted to keep my feelings out of it, to be objective in my observations. But it was becoming such a profound personal experience, it haunted even my dreams” (112).
Furthermore, the result of being refused freedoms and privileges because one’s skin tone causes some people, like Christophe, to despise their own skin color as external hatred is internalized. Griffin also struggles to understand the logic of white southerners who claim decency as part of their identity, but who simultaneously treat Black people as though they were animals. Griffin feels that Black men must also see this fallacy: “He cannot understand how the white man can show the most demeaning aspects of his nature and at the same time delude himself into thinking he is inherently superior” (81). Ultimately, Griffin’s experiment illustrates the power of social norms and attitudes in shaping identity and one’s perception of the self.