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More than fifty years after the publication of Black Like Me, scholars have yet to realize the potential for using John Howard Griffin and his famous book to alter some of our fundamental assumptions about identity and civil rights in postwar America. In 1959, Griffin darkened his skin, posed as a black man, and traveled through the Jim Crow South, documenting the cruel treatment he received from whites. His book, published in 1961, was a best-seller that became a staple in many high school and college courses for decades and continues to receive substantial media attention whenever there is a story about a white person passing as black.1 Despite all the attention it receives, however, the book still is not well understood. White audiences too often try to use the account of this white man to understand the African American experience under Jim Crow. Those who rightly criticize this approach, however, have likewise failed to appreciate the value this book can have when understood within an intersectional framework that includes disability, as well as gender and sexuality, in addition to race.2
Before he began work on Black Like Me, Griffin lost his sight for twelve years due to a war injury For a few years he hid the markers of his disability and passed as a sighted person, learning how to transgress an identity boundary long before his famous racial experiment. Eventually he embraced a blind identity, but left that behind when he regained his vision. While experiencing blindness, Griffin encountered other issues that intersected with disability, showing the multidimensional, intersectional nature of identity. Because of his internalized negative views about disability, Griffin struggled to maintain a masculinity he previously took for granted and sought out African American sex workers in an effort to rebuild his manhood. In these encounters, issues of disability, race, class, gender, and sexuality collided.
Griffin's difficulty reconciling intersectional issues of identity extended from his life into his writings and he attempted to compartmentalize his work on disability and race. His experiences with disability shaped one of the twentieth century's most popular and influential texts about passing, racism, and civil rights, yet he never acknowledges that influence in Black Like Me. His writings about blindness-which include...