Black Like Me

by John Howard Griffin

We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.

The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls and bodies of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared and the detested.

culture - learned behavior patterns so deeply ingrained they produce involuntary reactions - is a prison.

Would they see the immense melancholy that hung over the quarter, so oppressive that men had to dull their sensibilities in noise or wine or sex or gluttony in order to escape it? The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs, and to sob would be to realize, and to realize would be to despair.

It became apparent he was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths.

I thought of Maritain’s conclusion that the only solution to the problems of man is the return of charity (in the old embracing sense of caritas, not in the stingy literal sense it has assumed in our language and in our days) and metaphysics. Or, more simply, the maxim of St. Augustine: “Love, and then do what you will.”

By keeping “peaceful” in this instance, we end up consenting to the destruction of all peace - for so long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability, all real peace, all trust in man’s good intentions toward his fellow man.

I am annoyed by those who love mankind but are cruel and discourteous to people.

There are thousands of kinds of injustice but there is only one kind of justice - equal justice for all. To call for a little more justice, or a moderately gradual sort of justice, is to call for no justice. That is a simple truth.

The emotional garbage I had carried all of those years - the prejudice and the denial, the shame and the guilt - was dissolved by understanding that the Other is not other at all. All human beings face the same fundamental problems of loving and of suffering, of striving toward human aspirations for themselves and their children, of simply being and inevitably dying. These are the basic truths in all people, the common denominators of all cultures and all races and all ethnic categories. In reality, the Us-and-Them or I-and-Thou dichotomies do not exist. There is only one universal We - one human family united by the capacity to feel compassion and to demand equal justice for all.

I believe that before we can truly dialogue with one another we must first perceive intellectually, and then at the profoundest emotional level, that there is no Other - that the Other is simply Oneself in all the significant essentials.

One who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly…and with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

your vocation doesn’t necessarily conform to your nature.”