December 8, 2005
Gray Area Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:40 PM EST The FX cable channel says that next March it will present a six-part series called Black, White in which a black family and a white family will “trade places,” with the blacks made to appear white and the whites to appear black using makeup. During filming of the series, the two families lived together and were followed by cameras as they tried, as nearly as such artificial conditions would permit, to find out what it’s like to be a member of the other group. The obvious antecedent, of course, is the book Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, in which the author darkens his skin and records how he is treated in the Deep South in the late 1950s. As an article on our site shows Griffin was a fascinating man in many other ways: “He served in the French Resistance and soldiered in the South Pacific, where he lived for a year as an aborigine islander. He converted to Catholicism, and he thirsted for a life of prayer and chastity even while he wrote a novel banned in Detroit for its sexual explicitness. He lost his sight, lived for ten years as a blind man, and then miraculously recovered his vision. He was a musical scholar, a religious intellectual, a working journalist, a livestock breeder, a professional photographer, a social activist, and a controversial novelist.” Cases of whites pretending to be black, and vice versa, are quite common, in fiction and in real life. One of my favorites came in a column Langston Hughes wrote for the Chicago Defender during World War II. (I could look it up, but since this is a blog I don’t have to, so I’ll just work from memory.) Hughes was sitting in a bar in Harlem when a man he knew walked in wearing an Army uniform. The man, who was light-skinned, explained that not only was he in the Army, but he was serving in a supposedly all-white unit. He had been living in a town upstate, and when he registered for the draft, the clerk glanced at him and checked “White” on the form. At the time, blood banking was just getting started, impelled in large part by military needs. Soldiers were among the most frequent donors. To avoid upsetting racists, blood from black and white donors was kept separate. So Hughes wrote: What if my friend gave blood? It would be marked as white, of course. Now, imagine that someone sets off a small bomb on the floor of the U.S. Senate and some of the senators are injured. And imagine that Senator Bilbo of Mississippi is rushed to the hospital and given a transfusion of my friend’s “white” blood. (Bilbo was a notorious race-baiter and foe of miscegenation.) Remember, Hughes continued, Bilbo himself says that one drop of black blood is enough to make you black. Hughes goes on to have a great time imagining Bilbo rising on the Senate floor and demanding a fair-housing act, an anti-lynching law, and so forth. I doubt we’ll see anything that dramatic in the FX series. More significant, perhaps, will be the ratings. Griffin’s book was a sensation when it came out in 1960; he made the rounds of talk shows, sold the rights to Hollywood, and received thousands of letters. Will Black, White elicit similar levels of interest? I suspect not—and if I’m correct, it will be a sign that, for better or worse, race-related issues are no longer in the forefront of Americans’ minds the way they were half a century ago.
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