Black Like Me

This American classic has been corrected from the original manuscripts and indexed, featuring historic photographs and an extensive biographical afterword.

This American classic has been corrected from the original manuscripts and indexed, featuring historic photographs and an extensive biographical afterword.

In the autumn of 1959, a white Texan journalist named John Howard Griffin travelled across the Deep South of the United States disguised as a black man. Black Like Me is Griffin's own account of his journey. Originally commissioned by the African-American general-interest magazine Sepia under the title 'Journey into Shame', it was published in book-form in 1961, revealing to a white audience the day-to-day experience of racism in segregation-era America.Selling over five million copies, Black Like Me became one of the best-known accounts of race and racism in the 1960s, and helped turn the eyes of white society towards the everyday indignities and injustices of segregation. Today, sixty years after Griffin's extraordinary journey across the racial divide, Black Like Me's unrepeatable act of journalistic intrepidity stands as a fascinating document of its times. 'John Howard Griffin has come closer to understanding what it's like to be black in America than any white man that I know.' Louis Lomax, Saturday Review'If it was a frightening experience for him as nothing but a make-believe Negro for sixty-six days, then you think about what real Negroes in America have gone through for 400 years.' Malcom X

In this lyrical coming-of-age story about family, sisterhood, music, race, and identity, Mariama J. Lockington draws on some of the emotional truths from her own experiences growing up with an adoptive white family. I am a girl but most days I feel like a question mark. Makeda June Kirkland is eleven years old, adopted, and black. Her parents and big sister are white, and even though she loves her family very much, Makeda often feels left out. When Makeda's family moves from Maryland to New Mexico, she leaves behind her best friend, Lena— the only other adopted black girl she knows— for a new life. In New Mexico, everything is different. At home, Makeda’s sister is too cool to hang out with her anymore and at school, she can’t seem to find one real friend. Through it all, Makeda can’t help but wonder: What would it feel like to grow up with a family that looks like me? Through singing, dreaming, and writing secret messages back and forth with Lena, Makeda might just carve a small place for herself in the world. For Black Girls Like Me is for anyone who has ever asked themselves: How do you figure out where you are going if you don’t know where you came from?

The companion volume to the 50th-anniversary edition of Black Like Me, this book features John Howard Griffin’s later writings on racism and spirituality. Conveying a progressive evolution in thinking, it further explores Griffin’s ethical stand in the human rights struggle and nonviolent pursuit of equality—a view he shared with greats such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thomas Merton. Enlightening and forthright, this record also focuses on Griffin’s spiritual grounding in the Catholic monastic tradition, discussing the illuminating meditations on suffering and the author’s own reflections on communication, justice, and dying.

Flipping John Howard Griffin's classic Black Like Me, and extending Noel Ignatiev's How The Irish Became White into the present-day, Wise explores the meanings and consequences of whiteness, and discusses the ways in which racial privilege can harm not just people of color, but also whites. Using stories instead of stale statistics, Wise weaves a narrative that is at once readable and yet scholarly; analytical and yet accessible.

A refreshingly clearheaded and taboo-breaking look at race relations reveals that American culture is neither Black nor White nor Other, but a mix-a mongrel. Black Like You is an erudite and entertaining exploration of race relations in American popular culture. Particularly compelling is Strausbaugh's eagerness to tackle blackface-a strange, often scandalous, and now taboo entertainment. Although blackface performance came to be denounced as purely racist mockery, and shamefacedly erased from most modern accounts of American cultural history, Black Like You shows that the impact of blackface on American culture was deep and long-lasting. Its influence can be seen in rock and hiphop; in vaudeville, Broadway, and gay drag performances; in Mark Twain and "gangsta lit"; in the earliest filmstrips and the 2004 movie White Chicks; on radio and television; in advertising and product marketing; and even in the way Americans speak. Strausbaugh enlivens themes that are rarely discussed in public, let alone with such candor and vision: - American culture neither conforms to knee-jerk racism nor to knee-jerk political correctness. It is neither Black nor White nor Other, but a mix-a mongrel. - No history is best forgotten, however uncomfortable it may be to remember. The power of blackface to engender mortification and rage in Americans to this day is reason enough to examine what it tells us about our culture and ourselves. - Blackface is still alive. Its impact and descendants-including Black performers in "whiteface"-can be seen all around us today.