Finally, a white guy’s take on the black experience.
A whitesplanation of the whole thing, so to speak.
How else would we learn about Black America?
Certainly not from black people, they’re too biased.
Does no one remember the movie Soul Man?
Does anyone remember C Thomas Howell?
John Howard Griffin
He argued people should read the book before criticizing it, and declined to share a photo of the disguise he used during the writing process.
Real researchers are very explicit and forthright about their methodology…
“If people are looking for a minstrel show, they should look somewhere else.”
…and don’t insult people who ask legitimate questions about their work.
“Nobody has an experiential barometer with respect to race, for that matter,” he writes. “Nobody except for me… My barometer is better than anyone else’s.”
Exceptionally arrogant and (unsurprisingly) quite wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_Me
He describes his own writing in Seven Shoulders as a “tremendous literary achievement” and a “tremendous achievement in the realm of civic progress.”
More arrogance, in case you missed any of the other examples.
I don’t know what this guy’s deal is, but he’s doing everything possible to avoid being taken seriously. I happen to think that another book done as professionally and seriously as Black Like Me may be insightful and useful. Based on what I’ve seen so far, though, I don’t think that this self-aggrandizing stunt comes anywhere close to that standard.
Based on what I’ve seen so far
Does that include having read the book?
I totally understand the desire to not derail the conversation about his work by showing a photo of his disguise.
Describing his book like he did though, pretty arrogant yeah.
Conservative satire hoping to use left wing outrage to publicize his book for free.
You know when people complain about privileged white men who always feel like they need to make every conversation about them? This is the man. He’s the one we’re talking about. If this isn’t a very late, bizarre April Fool’s joke, he really thinks he did something with this. What an absolute clown.
He did really try to reboot the book Black Like Me?
At least he acknowledges he ripped the idea off
Or the show Black.White.?
Then there is Nuka Zeus
… Good god. I am now suffering from acute second-hand embarrassment
I need to see a photo of this motherfucker in blackface. I need it. We all deserve to see it.
I wanna hear the story from the POV of the Americans who picked up a hitchhiking method actor in full blackface.
No sane Americans pick up hitchhikers, so that would be interesting indeed.
I’ve picked up hitchhikers. Hey what are you saying?!
Why not just interview a shit ton of people who actually live this daily? And compare that against interviews with white dudes…
For anyone interested in someone who’s fantastic about interviewing people from all over the US (and maybe someoutside, cant remember), Peter Santenello is great. Found his videos on Appalachia one night when I couldn’t sleep and was hooked.
One of the few people that actually let’s people talk and tell their story without trying to be leading or get a sound bite.
We must’ve stumbled on the same Appalachia videos! I was hooked! He treats everyone with so much respect. Thanks for the reminder that he exists! I have a bunch of videos to catch up on.
There was another writer who did the same thing in the 60s or 70s. His book was called “Black like me”
He used melanin pills and makeup
That was brought up in the article but they didn’t go into much detail. How was that book received?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/black-like-me-50-years-later-74543463/ Here’s an interesting article on that.
By the late 1960s, however, the civil rights movement and rioting in Northern cities highlighted the national scale of racial injustice and overshadowed Griffin’s experiment in the South. Black Like Me, said activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), “is an excellent book—for whites.” Griffin agreed; he eventually curtailed his lecturing on the book, finding it “absurd for a white man to presume to speak for black people when they have superlative voices of their own.”
There is such thing as melanin pills?
Here’s how John Howard Griffin did it when writing Black Like Me:
In late 1959, John Howard Griffin went to a friend’s house in New Orleans, Louisiana. Once there, under the care of a dermatologist, Griffin underwent a regimen of large oral doses of the anti-vitiligo drug methoxsalen, and spent up to 15 hours daily under an ultraviolet lamp for about a week. He was given regular blood tests to ensure that he was not suffering liver damage. The darkening of his skin was not perfect, so he touched it up with stain. He shaved his head bald to hide his straight brown hair.
The tragedy here is that as an experiment, this could be informative.
Been done before and it’s really not informative. You could literally just (sorry if this scares you) talk to a Black person. They are capable of communicating the Black experience. White people don’t need to do it for them
I’m aware it’s been done before and your sarcasm isn’t appreciated
