"Black Like Me"- the story of a white that chooses to alter his skin color in order to find out what it is like to be a black person. The book is written from John Howard Griffin's point of view. He composes each incident that happens to him as a black person opposed to if he was a white person. He conveys each detail of his journey very specifically with a very objective point of view.
This book was written because a white man wanted to find out why black people were being oppressed and discriminated against. Was it because they were truly inferior? Certainly not. During the time of this book's writing, racism in the South was the utmost type of discrimination against any minority group in the U.S. White people were discriminating against blacks without cause or just. For some it was just something to do. This book delves into the reasons of discrimination from its source, the unsuspecting white man. The white man who didn't know that a bald black man was planning to expose his entire thinking of blacks in an attempt to rationalize his behavior of racism. In this quote Mr. Griffin describes his feelings about the "hate stare" he received from whites and how it affected him.
"Once again a "hate stare" drew my attention like a magnet. It came from a middle-aged, heavy-set, well-dressed white man. He sat a few yards away, fixing his eyes on me. 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?"".
"Black Like Me" illustrates many, many mentalities of the way whites think about blacks, but the central and most important ethical message that I found in the book was the power of ignorance.
