If I were to make a list of the ten or so books that have had the most profound influence on my life, I would have to include this one. I read it at quite a young age - I'm not sure if I was even in my teens yet - and its effect on me was staggering. This was the first book I encountered that showed me what monstrous evil and ignorance exists in the world. This (true) story - a white journalist darkens his skin and experiences life as a black man in the American south of the 1960's - marked my introduction into the tough "adult" world and made me decide what person I wanted to grow up to be. I hope I've managed to become that person; I've done my best.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

Released in observance of Black History Month.

Happy reading!

Found this book in the Starbucks at Yonge & Bloor. The BookCrossing label seems to have gotten removed (tsk tsk to whoever did that!), but thanks to geishabird, we've gotten that sorted out, and hopefully this book will have a long and happy BookCrossing career.

I've heard about this book, and it sounds very interesting. Thanks for the book!

Released for the 52 Towns in 52 Weeks Challenge.

This book is one I would put on my list of books everyone should read (not long, a little moer than 150 pages--go out and find it!). I know it's old news, but in some ways it isn't. In these days of "polite" prejudice or unconscious prejudice, it's easy to forget that this is a world that existed well within living memory. And it makes me wonder what egregious things we allow in our society but accept because we consider them normal. A quick glance at Wikipedia says that Griffin did not indeed die from the drug he used to darken his skin, as I'd heard, although it would be hard to imagine a better cause to martyr oneself to. It also seems he had a pretty interesting life--probably worth reading up on at some point. Thanks for the book!

Some of my thoughts (disorganized, since I'd like to get my release notes done quickly):

• As a person who looks vaguely native American, without actually being, I've often experienced the sort of extremely generous behaviour from native Americans which Griffin describes getting from black people. I sense that this is about rebuilding community and offering mutual support. I often feel guilty about this, since I haven't experienced the same socioeconomic discrimination (and I doubt someone inclined to be racist would look for those sorts of subtleties in my features). People are intelligent and possess self-awareness and agency, and I think it oversimplifies the problems involved to assume that oppressed people could fix them by simply acting differently themselves, since so many are already doing so much.
• I think it might be worth hearing about the experiences of someone who has been, at least outwardly, both male and female. I've heard a number of transexuals say that you get much more respect as a man than as a woman, and certainly it often comes up that men are completely unaware of things that are regular experiences for women. It similarly seems that we live physically in close proximity but in some ways in different worlds. Yet our society still likes to think that women allow themselves to be oppressed, that it's all about self-oppression, perhaps as a result of socialization, but so much of the focus is on whether a given woman is being "a good feminist", as though if she is, people will automatically give her the respect she's due. But there's more than enough external prejudice and inequality that it's worth not ignoring as a factor. It's not clear to me why the parallels between racism and sexism aren't more obvious to people (like how for some reason it's still acceptable to assert gender differences in mental abilities, even though we've decided it's unacceptable in race, even when there's little to no evidence to support it and certainly none that couldn't be explained in a million other ways). Hofstadter wrote an article (a "person paper") which appears in Metamagical Themas which makes some of these differences blatant.
• I found the section of the book where Griffin was hitchhiking at night interesting. He found that a lot of white men sexualized the blacks, and discusses the hypocrisy involved in this view--morally judging the sexual behaviour that they wished to participate in. It struck me as potentially similar to how Asian culture is often viewed in the west, often based on pornography aimed at the western market looking to see exactly that (I have heard that there are more acts of domination of the woman in the pornography aimed at the Western market, for example), and how Asian women are often viewed not even as a kinky sex partner so much as a kinky sex toy--not as a person who particularly enjoys domination or unconventional sexual acts, but as an appropriate prop for them. Incidentally, the consultant for Memoirs of a Geisha sued the author for defamation. I haven't read it, or her autobiographies, but my understand is that he chose to portray geisha as prostitutes based on a counterfactual event he wrote. But somehow this sort of portrayal of Asian women and Asian culture becomes mainstream and is generally believed. The same hypocrisy seems evident, one displaces ones prurient interest in certain sexual acts onto another culture in order to distance oneself, and enjoys judging the act that one is actually the author of.
• Actually, I think that one also applies in gender issues as well--a lot of cultures (including ours) view women as being, say, sinful because they cause men to sin, or shallow and frivolous because men's interest in them is shallow and frivolous, or unintellectual and corporeal, because the man's interest is in her body rather than her mind.
• I thought the role of the church, not to mention the military, in the race issue were interesting. Both are often seen now as particularly conservative institutions, and often have been in their stands on current issues, but apparently seemed to be much more progressive on this issue at this time.
• As much as it would be nice to see Griffin as perfect, he certainly isn't. I have to admit, when he was listing hardships faced by black men, when he lists the fact that their wives often make more money than them, it made me twitch a little. Also, he's inclined to view the church and people involved with it as being perfect in a way that certainly isn't true.
• On a lighter note, I enjoyed this article, and I think that some of the current dialogue on prejudice is sometimes a little too much like this.