Prison of Culture: Beyond Black Like Me

John Howard Griffin, 1959, preparing himself for the journey through the South that would change both himself and America. Photograph by Don Rutledge.

Prison of Culture: Beyond Black Like Me © 2011 by The Estate of John Howard Griffin and Elizabeth Griffin-Bonazzi. See acknowledgments for publication histories of individual essays. Introduction © 2011 by Robert Bonazzi. All rights reserved.

First Edition, 2011

Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-916727-82-6

ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-147-4

Kindle ISBN: 978-1-60940-148-1

Library PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-149-8

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Griffin, John Howard, 1920-1980.

Prison of culture: beyond Black like me / John Howard Griffin; edited by Robert Bonazzi; with a preface by Studs Terkel. -- 1st ed.

       p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-916727-82-6 (pbk., printed edition: alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-147-4 (epub ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-148-1 (kindle ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-149-8 (library pdf ebook)

1. United States—Race relations. 2. Discrimination—United States. 3. Stereotypes (Social psychology)--United States. 4. Prejudices—United States. 5. Racism—United States. 6. Spirituality. I. Bonazzi, Robert. II. Terkel, Studs, 1912- III. Title.

E185.615.G73 2011

305.800973--dc23

2011019450

Except for fair use in reviews and/or scholarly considerations, no portion of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of Robert Bonazzi, representing the Estate of John Howard Griffin and Elizabeth Griffin-Bonazzi.

Contents

A Remembrance

by Studs Terkel

Introduction: Beyond Black Like Me

by Robert Bonazzi

I. Essays on Racism

Privacy of Conscience

The Intrinsic Other

Profile of a Racist

On Killers of the Dream

Requiem for A Martyr

Racist Sins of Christians

Malcolm X

American Racism in the Sixties

From A Time To Be Human

II. Essays on Spirituality

Poulenc Behind the Mask

Fraternal Dialogue

The Little Brothers

The Terrain of Physical Pain

Final Reflections

Acknowledgments

About the Editor

To the Memory of Studs Terkel

A Remembrance

Griffin never failed to astonish. It was his capacity to go beyond himself.

He suffered more ills than any man should be heir to—you name it, he had it.

Let’s not even talk about that awful beating he took in the kidneys when the Klan caught up with him along some southern dirt road. When he died, his wife Elizabeth said it was of everything.

But he had endured so long because he was possessed by the Other.

When he transformed himself in Black Like Me, he was responding to the challenge: To wake up some morning in the oppressed’s skin. To think human rather than white. To feel human. Feeling, as much as understanding, is what he was all about.

In his empathy for the Other, he understood the tragedy of the child who belongs to the oppressor species, living in darkness. The Klansman’s kid, the Nazi’s child, the bigot’s offspring. It was this dying of the light he most raged against.

During my last visit, he lay on his dying bed. He despaired of the mindless official optimism and the unofficial cynicism and yet he clung to the slender reed of hope. Life is a risk, Griffin told me during our last visit. And what a horror if you don’t face those risks. If you don’t, you end up being utterly paralyzed. You don’t ever do anything.

I can’t help but reflect on the other roads this gifted man might have traveled had he not been possessed by the Other. Several literary critics have conjectured that had John Howard Griffin been less committed, he might have become an important American novelist. As matters stand, he was merely an important human being.

Let’s settle for that.

Studs Terkel

Chicago, 1980

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

—Simone Weil (1909-1943)

He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.

—Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Take the teaching of logic out of a civilization and reason is reduced to the squalor of prejudice. All of the classic fallacies of logic then become a sort of weird virtue and man seeks by loudness, fear and violence to win causes that could not be won by rational persuasion.

—John Howard Griffin, 1960

Introduction

Beyond Black Like Me

Robert Bonazzi

The Intrinsic Other

A central theme of Prison of Culture—that cultures tend to view other cultures as intrinsically other, as less developed versions of their presumed superior culture—was one of Griffin’s core concepts. In his seminal essay ("The Intrinsic Other") he lucidly characterizes this inculcated attitude and clarifies the fallacies inherent in it.

Griffin writes: "One of the characteristics of our expression of such attitudes is that they are often perfectly natural to the speaker but unnatural to the hearer. They reveal in the speaker the falsity of viewing others as intrinsically Other, intrinsically different as men. This intrinsic difference always implies some degree of inferiority." These societal attitudes are taught directly by our in-group and absorbed indirectly from culture, imprisoning our perceptions within an unconscious code of prejudice.

In "The Intrinsic Other" Griffin cites the Irish jurist Edmund Burke for providing the logical and ethical touchstone for this error when he said: ‘I know of no way of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.’ Racism begins when we draw up an indictment against a whole people merely by considering them as under-developed versions of ourselves, by perpetuating the blindness of the stereotype. Griffin emphasizes this point in the essay. "This is insidious because it is often done in good faith, is often accomplished with an illusion of benevolence. It leads to master delusion. The delusion lies in the fact that no matter how well we think we know the Other, we still judge from within the imprisoning framework of our own limited cultural criteria, we still speak within the cliché of the stereotype."

For Griffin there was no intrinsic Other. He perceived only extrinsic differences among individuals in stark contrast to the essential commonalities of all human beings. "The illusion of the Other, of these superficial differences, is deeply imbedded through this inculcated stereotype we make of the Other, which falsifies man’s view of man. I believe that before we can truly dialogue in depth, we must first perceive that there is no Other, that the Other is oneself in all essentials."

Since 2003, as revealed by the Human Genome Project, we now know "that the Other is oneself in all essentials. While every human being has a unique DNA sequence that differs from every other person on the planet, we differ from each other by just 0.1%, regardless of ethnic origin. All humans are 99.9% the same, and therefore race" is not a biological reality but merely a cultural phenomenon based on prejudice.

Profile of A Racist is a brief typology of racists. The first type feels he has the duty to indulge in violence and murder for the good of society—the type we associate with the Ku Klux Klan or the Gestapo. But it is the second type who gets overlooked, the one who metaphorically weaves the lynch rope that he himself would not use, keeping silent about routine injustices and denying any prejudice, because this type was the direct beneficiary of the segregated system.

In Germany this second type kept silent about the extermination of the Jews, and the pattern of madness led to the genocide of the European Jewish community, to the de facto enslavement of the segregated African American minority in the Deep South, and to the ultimate dehumanization of society. Griffin first realized the tragic truth of this process, refined to hideous perfection, when as a student in France he worked in the resistance movement. Hitler had drawn up an anti-Semitic indictment against the Jewish people, blaming his victims for every real or imagined problem in Germany.

In A Time To Be Human (1977), Griffin looks back on the Jewish families he befriended and hid away in the alley boarding houses of Tours, France. It was in those rooms that Jewish parents, realizing that eventually they would be captured and shipped to concentration camps, asked him and his French friends in the Defense Passive to take their children to safety. Near the end of this reflection, he makes the connection between those boarding house rooms and the shanty rooms of the Deep South, where he witnessed the same grief on the faces of black parents who had lost their children to white racist violence.

Requiem for A Martyr (1964) tells such a story. Clyde Kennard was framed for a petty crime and sentenced to seven years of hard labor, because he was the first black person to register at a segregated college in Mississippi. Kennard had been a paratrooper in Korea, an honors scholar at the University of Chicago, and a tax-paying citizen in the county where the college was located. Yet his peaceful actions were considered an attack upon segregation.

The Christ Ideal

When asked how he could advocate breaking some laws while obeying others, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. responded: "The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws. There are just and unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘An unjust law is no law at all.’ His sources of wisdom were not only to be found in the work of Thoreau, but he had also studied the example of Gandhi’s creed of nonviolence. Gandhi had revered Christ as the ultimate figure to have offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world." In King’s magnificent text to clergymen in 1963, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he offered several astute arguments about justice and the law.

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust…. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself…. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority, and the segregated a false sense of inferiority… segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful….So I urge men to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.

King then placed these reflections into a context of Christian theology for his fellow clergymen in order to reveal his nonviolent intent. In no sense, he points out, 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. Breaking a law because one’s conscience determines it to be unjust was for King expressing the highest respect for law.

Gandhi wrote that an unjust law is a species of violence, and the law of nonviolence says that violence should not be resisted by counter-violence but by nonviolence. Both men endured imprisonment willingly and were prepared to die for the Christ ideal. Gandhi considered Christ’s crucifixion a perfect act of Charity.

In a Griffin essay about the Montgomery bus boycott, for Ramparts magazine, he stated King’s challenge:

King’s first problem was to inspire his people not only to persevere in their battle for freedom but to limit themselves to a single weapon—the weapon of Love: to return love for hate; to embrace a truth strange to modern ears but which black people’s lives had uniquely prepared them to understand—that unearned suffering is redemptive. He asked fifty thousand people to do that rare thing—to make themselves subservient to an ideal (the Christ Ideal) in the face of opponents who made ideals subservient to their prejudices. His second problem was to place the Christ Ideal in firm opposition to segregationists, who were persuaded that they themselves acted from the noblest Christian motives and felt it wholly within the framework of Christianity to smear, terrorize, kill or do anything else to protect the traditional Southern Christian System from anyone who sought to alter it.

The fraternal love ethic of Christ and Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience were integral to Gandhi’s nonviolent creed, which ended the occupation of the British in India, as well as to King’s Christian values that eventually dismantled the segregated system in the Deep South. These peaceful resistance movements, led by two religious leaders committed to human rights for all, not only avoided most physical violence but also the internal violence of the spirit, as King pointed out.

Through physical attacks, jailings, framed-up assaults on his character, King continued to lead and inspire… writes Griffin. "In the market place of harshest reality he proved his thesis: that the Christ Ideal is not only a valid way, but in the case of Montgomery, Alabama, was the only way to insure victory: that the highest idealism is the ultimate practicality."

The Christ Ideal was evident also in Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, an autobiographical account of a privileged white woman in Georgia. After Griffin reviewed the book, a fascinating correspondence between the two novelists began. When he read the new edition, he hastily typed reactions directly into his journal.

Lillian Smith seeks to recreate the southern experience in order to help both her fellow southerners and all men understand the tremendous forces that have grown into the southern white and led him to Kill the Dream of our founding fathers all in deluding himself that he is preserving something infinitely more precious—the South, segregation, southern womanhood. In order to show the tragic growth of all these forces, she writes a semi-autobiographical work, telling of her typical southern upbringing, the influences on childhood in a genteel southern family, the combined degradation of the South after the Civil War, and the assuagement they took in the only thing that could not be degraded—the white superiority of their skin (abetted by ruthless politicians and wealthy families). White supremacy became their firmest belief—the Negro became the object on which they could safely vent all of their hatreds and frustrations.

Griffin had not read the first edition of Killers of the Dream (1950), since he was blind at the time. He knew only Smith’s first novel, Strange Fruit, which had a powerful effect on him as a teenager (and he mentions this in Black Like Me). The opening of the review differs from his journal: "Lillian Smith, as the whole world surely knows, is a Southern Lady. Twelve