White Like Me

So long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability.

― John Howard Griffin

As the president golfs before his Juneteenth rally in Tulsa, my social media stream is ablaze with denial by his "color blind" followers there's an "elephant in the room," white privilege.

While I was a freshman in high school, the Jesuits had us read Black Like Me, a still-new nonfiction best-seller by a Catholic novelist named John Howard Griffin.

In the book, Griffin described a six-week exploit in the Deep South during which he traveled the byways of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia disguised as an indigent black.

Though whites in the South insisted all blacks were "happy," Griffin's adventure from beginning to end proved a “personal nightmare.”

Griffin's travels were peppered with bullying and threats, venomous insults, and continual encounters with what he labeled the omnipresent "hate stare."

Over 10 million Americans read Black Like Me when it first appeared in bookstores in 1961; and millions more saw the 1964 motion picture. 

Griffin's story convinced many of them that blacks indeed were painfully, egregiously disadvantaged.

Sixty years later, blacks are still disadvantaged―though you'd never know it from the conservatives yakking on my social media stream.

From them you'd conclude all blacks are white―like me.