'Black Like Me'
Was John Howard's novel inspired by this movie? A guy who isn't, pretends to be a member of an oppressed underclass. Just sounds similar.
shareI think he claimed an incident in his own life insprired it. A facinating read BTW.
And a good movie also. I think James Whitmore starred in it.
shareA really great book. Hard to find, though.
shareI remember reading "Black Like Me" sometime in the mid-late 60s. I no longer have a copy. I guess one could go to Ebay, Amazon or Barnes and Noble and try to get a used copy there.
shareYes, it was an excellent book. Too bad we can't safely "change" our race/ethnicity for a few days. Might make us understand each other better.
shareYou can't slip into a character for a few days or weeks and expect to understand what a lifetime means. This is part of what makes this movie so egregious. When the Garfield character says to Green, words to the effect that, 'now he understands everything', this is so manifestly false it beggars belief Garfield could have uttered it without objection.
So long as Green can stand up and say 'Only kidding guys!' and go back to his normal life in California, the sense of lifelong frustration cannot be imitated or understood. It is like claiming Tootsie got the whole picture of what it must be like to be a woman in the mid to late 20th Century. A hint maybe, but the makers of AGA are pulling themselves, and us, if they think they can pass this off as an authentic experience.
It isn't. It is a form of tourism and about as insightful.
Jac: You must keep in mind, though, that Phil was pretending to be Jewish for the specific purpose of writing a magazine article. He wasn't expecting to know everything there was to know about the Jewish experience of antisemitism; he was simply gathering impressions and information for an assignment. He even titled his article, "I was Jewish for Six Weeks."
And I took John Garfield's line to mean that now Phil knows "everything" in the sense that now he knows the most hurtful thing: the emotional harm that antisemitism can do to one's own child.
John Howard Griffin's "Black Like Me" is easy to find. Just go to Amazon and you will see a half dozen different editions of it including the 50th anniversary edition. They will take no more than 10 seconds to find.
John Howard Griffin was not the first journalist to diguise himself as a black man in order to expose Jim Crow in the deep south.
In 1948, journalist Ray Sprigle took a 30 day trip and covered a 4000 miles in the deep south disguied as a black man, named James Crawford. He wrote a series of articles about his experiences for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. The 21 articles were called "I was a Negro for 30 days" and they led to his 1949 book, "In the Land of Jim Crow" (which you can also find on Amazon). The 21 articles were also became a syndicated newspaper series.
Earlier in his career, Sprigle had exposed that Hugo Black,an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1937 to 1971, had been a high ranking member of the Klan.