White like me ? or, seeing the world through "Black Like Me"

As America celebrates the 50th anniversary of John Griffin's "Black Like Me," a writer recalls more recent scenarios that Griffin would have found only too familiar.

In 1959, a white man from Texas darkened his skin with chemicals, became a "Negro," and set out to chronicle his experience as a black man busing and hitchhiking his way across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

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Two years later John Griffin published his expose "Black Like Me" and the world received a shocking eyewitness account of raw racial hatred. By this time Griffin had become white again. He was hung in effigy in his hometown.

Much has changed since Griffin experienced the humiliations of segregated buses, bathrooms, and the "hate stare." I read Griffin's book when I was nine years old growing up three miles from Thomas Jefferson's home Monticello in Virginia. Lyndon Byrd Johnson had just passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Griffin's account so profoundly shook me that it remained on my bookshelf for the next four decades. Dry as a dessicated Dead Sea scroll, the original paperback still sits on my bookcase, its unglued binding swathed in masking tape from some rescue attempt I've long forgotten, cracking whenever I turn a page.

As a curious white girl who explored Monticello's dank slave quarters, I found Griffin's lens on race relations riveting. In the town of Charlottesville, Va., we still had "Colored Only"? signs on the side of the downtown movie theatre (pointing to the back of the building). Neighbors heatedly debated when we would integrate our pools, country clubs, and private schools. I can still today feel the fury of a mother whose middle-school-aged white daughter, a friend of mine, had a crush on a black student.

Then, as payback for White Power, Black Power struck with fury. Close black friends no longer wanted to talk or walk with me. I realized they were reacting to the cultural remnants of the Old South all around them, but I felt the sting of these losses. They glared at me as we passed down high school hallways. A dozen black students I did not know launched stones at me as I walked home one day.

For these angry high school students, I had become the symbol of all they found remiss in the land of liberty.

As an adult working overseas, these memories receded. It was only when I returned in the 1990s to Annapolis, Md., capital of a former border state with divided Confederate and Union loyalties, that I realized how far we had come ? and how far we still had to go ? in untangling the complex web of race relations spun in America.

At the time, my son was eleven months old ? on the cusp of trying out his first words. On an outing with him in his stroller through downtown, I saw a large crowd. I was told a KKK rally was being held at the Capitol building. Suddenly the two of us were swept into an anti-KKK demonstration moving swiftly up Main Street. Briefly I thought this must be a flashback ? perhaps I had inadvertently time-travelled to an earlier ugly era.

But no, the Klansmen had assembled in their iconic white gowns and steepled hoods before the State House, staging their event in full view of the state's seat of legislative power. Policemen advised me to keep at a distance. Upon seeing the KKK's gowns, my son, perched high in his stroller, thought it an appropriate moment to attempt speech. His words were not the usual "cat," "dog,"? or "Mommy," but a marchers' chant.

"K-K-K, Go a-way!" he shouted.

It was a six-syllable rhyme as easy as a Dr. Seuss verse. He recited it for many days to come.

Since that day my son has mastered a wider lexicon, blacks continue to fill the ranks of the middle class, and America has elected its first black president.

And yet what really brought home to me the drama of America's race relations came recently in the unlikely setting of a medical office. I had fallen. My ankle had morphed into a black and blue mass the size of a small football. My doctor started her examination when her cell phone chimed. She quickly took the call and hung up after a brief conversation.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/ftXZ-PbXSrE/White-like-me-or-seeing-the-world-through-Black-Like-Me

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