Black Like Me (29 page)

If this cover story for the mainstream Catholic monthly,
Sign
, had not embarrassed the hierarchy enough, an even deeper alienation among the black clergy was revealed in a second 1963 cover piece for
Ramparts
, the most radical Catholic magazine of the day. It was in his dialogue with Father August Thompson, that the young priest from Louisiana declared that “in some areas, we Negro priests might be called second-class Christs, if that’s possible.” Stunned by this, Griffin replied: “We know that we do have
the profound scandal of second-class Catholics—I mean this is a situation that is too well-known to hide any longer—but when it is the scandal of a ‘second-class Christ’ it becomes inconceivable.” Both pieces stirred controversy but many Church officials denied these claims and Father Thompson’s bishop tried to censor the interview. But leading thinkers like Thomas Merton, French philosopher Jacques Maritain and black theologian Albert Cleage confirmed the truth of these allegations.

Dr. King’s 1963
Letter From A Birmingham Jail
clarifies the morality of resisting segregation: “An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal.” He poses a question answered by civil disobedience. “Isn’t segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I urge men to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.” Like his mentor Mohandas Gandhi, King drew on Christ’s teachings and the work of Henry David Thoreau, saying: “In no sense, do I advocate evading or defying the law as a rabid segregationist would do. This would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do it
openly, lovingly
…and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” Both holy men awakened public conscience peacefully, accepted imprisonment willingly, and expected to be martyrs. They were victims of violence, despite their non-violent creed and espousal of a religious ideal whose source was Christ’s crucifixion, which Gandhi called “a perfect act of Charity.”

The strategy of peaceful resistance helped erase segregation ordinances in the South. But after the 1964 Civil Rights Bill became law, “racists redoubled their efforts in the name of patriotism and Christianity, to suppress not only black people but all nonracists,” Griffin declares in his 1969 book,
The Church and the Black Man
. Since social integration “always depends on the conversion of the hostile force,” blacks abandoned King’s dream and pursue other political strategies.

Black Power called for “black people to consolidate behind their own, so they can bargain from a position of strength,” wrote the authors of
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America
. In
their 1967 blueprint for new political action, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton envisioned a different result from white power. “The ultimate values and goals are not dominion or exploitation of other groups, but rather an effective share in the total power of the society.” The most common criticism judged Black Power as a form of reverse racism. This was a false analogy, since blacks had not lynched whites or bombed their churches. According to Carmichael, racism was not merely a question of attitude, because “the problem of racism arises only when there’s power to carry out your acts.” Racist attitudes can cause emotional pain, but without the power to injure or kill a black person with impunity, which was the case in some tacit police states, an attitude remains merely personal. Carmichael was perceived by most whites as a militant leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. “What few whites realize,” Griffin pointed out, “is that for years Stokely Carmichael—a man of great insights—was a flawless advocate of nonviolent resistance; not only was he an advocate, he lived nonviolence heroically. For years when he was slapped down, insulted, jailed and abused, he would fall on his knees and pray for those who abused him….he prayed for the dehumanized white who loathed him for the unforgivable sin of not being a ‘good nigger’… Finally, he could take no more,” and turned to Black Power. Carmichael later took the African name Kwame Turé, never preached violence, but advocated the right to bear arms for self-defense, as did most white citizens, all gun clubs and hate clans.

According to Reverend Albert Cleage (in
The Church and the Black Man
), the question of violence was irrelevant, observing that fellow blacks “were rather weird creatures dedicated to nonviolence in the midst of a nation as violent as America is, has been, and will be.” As for separatism, he points out that “we were separate and yet we dreamed of integration and therefore did not utilize the separation to our benefit, but permitted it to be utilized for our exploitation.” During the Black Liberation Movement there emerged a new sensibility, a recognition of black identity and beauty, a demand for self-esteem, self-determination and pride in peaceful communities.

While always a believer in nonviolence, Griffin insisted in 1971 that the lecture bureau represent him with this statement: “I’m a firm believer in Black Power, as I believe any man who wants the good of the total community must be. It is a tragedy that nonviolence didn’t work. The black man was trying to cure his white brother with it, but the white man wouldn’t be cured. Nonviolent resistance has done more than we realize, though. I think history will show that it accomplished an enormous thing in men’s souls. It didn’t fail, it just didn’t complete the job. Black Power is a progression from it. It’s the black’s assertion of his humanity, and it requires us to confront one another as equals.”

These developments gained political power for individuals and group efforts, but the black community could not attain equal footing against an entrenched system supported by centuries of institutionalized racism. Any critique of the black liberation struggle from 1955 to 1975 cannot be judged as
progress
from a white capitalist perspective. Rather it must be understood as a
process
of revolutionary awareness of the necessity for simple justice as the basis for a sane, moral and peaceful society. We know of the leaders during that period but tend to overlook the contributions of students who were the foot soldiers of the movement. “Because of these young people,” said the late Fannie Lou Hamer, who organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party of black delegates in 1964 with the support of students, “I think for the first time we have a chance to make democracy a reality in the United States.”

For Griffin, the tumultuous 1960s began with the unexpectedness of
Black Like Me
and ended with
The Church and the Black Man
, his anthology of radical black voices that fell on deaf white ears. The only similarity between his two works was hate mail each had generated. Then he endured the return of censorship in the mid-1970s, when
Black Like Me
was pulled from library shelves—along with Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
, considered the most illuminating novel of black experience in the 20th century, Harper Lee’s
To Kill A Mockingbird
and works by Mark Twain—all due to “objectionable” language. One lawsuit, later dismissed,
was filed against
Black Like Me
, contending it was “totally objectionable, obscene and perverting” when “intentionally directed to 13-year-olds.” He was bewildered by the white backlash, especially the claim that his lectures were “a deliberate plan to subvert the minds of young children.” By the 1980s these banned books had become part of the literary canon, and today they are required reading from mid-school through college levels.

From the outset of his lecture tours, Griffin told audiences: “I don’t stand up here and represent myself as a spokesman for black people,” emphasizing this point in books as well. “This is a personal book,” begins
A Time To Be Human
, his final overview on racism in 1977. “I will simply talk about my own experiences with racism; first as a white child growing up in Texas, then as a black man in the South in 1959, and since then as a white man once again in the ghettos of most of our major cities and in many other countries.” Griffin explained his position: “I have become far less visible as a public figure involved in racial reconciliation. Once a few whites had to speak out for justice and interracial dialogue at a time when whites would not listen to blacks. But those days are over and it is absurd for a white man to presume to speak for black people when they have superlative voices of their own.” He agreed with black leaders who suggested that white activists focus on educating their own communities. He had done that, but also perceived his role as “a bridge to reconcile the tremendous duality of information and viewpoint which whites and blacks have and on which they make their judgments—as well as the kind of misinformation whites believe that leads them to make judgments that are ethnic rather than human.”

Griffin was such an effective voice for equal justice because of the unique perspective of the
Black Like Me
experience and his direct involvement in the human rights movements and crises of the 1960s and 1970s. But he was effective also because of his communicative gifts and a compelling truthfulness. He served as a bridge for dialogue between the communities since he had “access to and experience in both black and white cultures.” However, his
work was “not a vocation that is specifically black and white,” but a deeper spiritual quest that he called “a vocation for the reconciliation of humanity.” Yet he held no heroic illusions about who he was or what he did, realizing that this was “not the kind of work which produces statistical or measurable results.” He never expected to witness the end of racism or the beginning of King’s “Beloved Community” in his lifetime. Yet he continued the social struggle even as it went against his deepest personal inclinations. “It isn’t my nature to be an activist,” he told Studs Terkel in 1978, “but your vocation doesn’t necessarily conform to your nature.” Being the reluctant activist, public life cut against his desire for family intimacy, for writing novels, for spiritual contemplation. Too often he lectured while ill or recovering from surgeries, traveling when mobility was reduced to crutches or a wheelchair. But he answered to a higher will that demanded merciful acts in a merciless world.

Looking back in
A Time To Be Human
, Griffin writes about the hate stares when disguised as a Negro, and skeptical readers claimed he had overstated the case. “Whites have sometimes argued that I felt this degradation more deeply than black people because it was new to me, whereas black people had known nothing else all their lives.” He realized this was a matter of
thinking white
, of projecting cultural stereotypes. “This is utterly untrue,” Griffin says, because prejudice “burns any man, and no person ever gets accustomed to it that it does not burn. Such whites say it the way they have
seen
it, but I say it in the way I have
experienced
it.”

Before
Black Like Me
, he held the same stereotypes to be true without questioning their inherent logical fallacies—assuming Negroes “led essentially the same kind of lives whites know, with certain inconveniences caused by discrimination and prejudice.” His deepest shock came not from inconvenience but as a total shift in reality. “Everything is different. Everything changes. As soon as I got into areas where I had contact with white people, I realized that I was no longer regarded as a human individual.
Surely one of the strangest experiences a person can have is suddenly to step out into the streets and find that the entire white society is convinced that an individual possesses qualities and characteristics which that person knows he does
not
possess. I am not speaking here only of myself. This is the mind-twisting experience of every black person I know.”

All questions concerning the authenticity of his experiment cannot be
answered
only intuited. Complex subjectivity cannot be distilled to a precise point of objectivity. But Griffin was a keen observer of people and witnessed the behavior of whites caught up in the racist syndrome, as if “blackness” were absolute proof of inferiority. Also he was a careful listener and, since he was accepted as a Negro in their community, black people expressed their true thoughts and feelings without fear of reprisal. What he was privileged to hear, no white person would have been trusted to hear. And what he learned was that “blackness was not a color but a lived experience.”

Because Griffin faced his racism with harsh self-criticism, he was able to deprogram the prejudices he had been taught. What he does not say directly but which the overall spirit of
Black Like Me
implies, was that his journey was inspired by religious ideals and pushed forward by a vow of obedience to those ideals. His “motives” for risking the experiment can be understood only in this spiritual context. In his Preface that was written after the experiment, he says the book “traces the changes that occur to heart and body and intelligence.” Yes, and it also traces a soul’s journey through change.
Black Like Me
, a creative act of insight
par excellence
, transcends the conventional limits of cultural perception to reveal a spiritual vision for overcoming man’s inhumanity to man.

We are all born innocent with the essentials we call human nature, and not one of us entered this world with any inborn bias. Ye t we all learned prejudice, because every culture teaches us to honor its way while subtly denigrating other cultures. At best, we are taught conscious lessons in tolerance, but prejudices are slippery, precisely because they are often unconscious. Eventually these cultural attitudes are codified through irrational emotion,
unfounded opinion and blind belief. Even though prejudice changes names—colonialism, racism, genocide, anti-Semitism, apartheid, ethnic-cleansing and profiling—every alias results in the same injustice. We shall remain prisoners of culture unless we become aware of the process and force ourselves to confront it and to deprogram it. Griffin accomplished this through the experience of
Black Like Me
and then clarified the process of racism in “The Intrinsic
Other
” in 1966. “Beyond Otherness” revisits both works, and it was the last piece he wrote about racism, in 1979, the year before he died.