Noble intent
Blackface was for years a staple of mainstream entertainment rooted in the minstrel shows of 19th-Century America.
Big stars like Bing Crosby and Judy Garland have appeared in blackface and one of the biggest of them all, Al Jolson, rarely appeared without it.
More highbrow examples of the “art” – Laurence Olivier playing Othello for example – seem to me to raise subtly different questions which are certainly worth exploring, although perhaps not within the confines of this article.
It is, by now, forgotten more or less (unless you buy French Vogue or watch Australian talent shows, of course) so it is a little depressing to find it cropping up in Black History Month and on the anniversary of John Howard Griffin’s challenging odyssey through Old Dixie.
At least it serves a purpose though – it reminds us that Griffin’s experiment was perhaps the only occasion on which one man assumed the race of another with noble intent.
It is worth reading what he wrote – and then reflecting, in this age of the first African-American president, on how far we have come.
And how far we have to go.
John Howard Griffin was a remarkable man. As a Texan teenager who found himself in France at the outbreak of World War II, he helped to smuggle Jewish children to safety and freedom.
He then served with distinction in the US Air Force in the Pacific. And then, after the war – when illness struck him blind for 10 years while he was still relatively young – he became a prolific writer.
It was after his sight returned that he hit upon the idea of Black Like Me, the work which is his most important legacy.
The whole business of racial impersonation might make us feel vaguely uncomfortable now, but in 1959 a black writer simply could not have found an audience for such a graphic portrayal of African-American grievance.
Only a white writer prepared to take the extraordinary steps that Griffin took could tell the story.
His biographer Robert Bonazzi – who went on to marry Griffin’s widow – told me how in practical terms the white Texan set up transforming himself into a black Southerner.
