Black Griffin, Standing Against Racism.

In “Black Like Me,” Griffin encounters boundaries, borders, and bridges in many of his recorded experiences. I feel that I cannot properly point out examples of each without providing even a rough definition of what boundaries, borders, and bridges are.

According to my perspective, applying these words as terms related to intercultural interaction would make boundaries the things that are made exclusive to one group only, borders the things or places or moments that allow a limited amount of interchange between two groups that are more used to the boundaries between them, and bridges the actions or people that attempt to bypass boundaries entirely and do more intercultural good than mere borders.

In an incident that begins on the bottom of page 130 and continues to page 132, a physical altercation nearly starts when two white women board a bus Griffin is riding and cannot find a seat in the “white” section. I received the impression that this incident contained examples of boundaries, borders, and bridges. The bus in this passage, like most buses across the USA at that time, was a border on wheels in which both black and white people could share an enclosed space and take advantage of the same public service. However, it was also a border right next to a boundary, for the space within the bus was segregated into two sections according to race, and while the two races did technically share the service of transportation, greater privilege and higher priority was given to the whites, a fact which became blatantly obvious and blatantly ugly when pressure was exerted by some of the white passengers for a black passenger to surrender his seat so that the white women wouldn’t have to sit directly next to any black person. The bridges in this scene are fairly feeble ones, but they exist nonetheless. An argument could be made that the bus driver coming to the back and attempting to negotiate with the black passengers could be seen as a temporary bridge of sorts, since it forced him to consider them as a force to literally be reckoned with rather than pushed and herded…although perhaps this is more of a “border.” The short plea to the whites and meaningful look of apology to the blacks that were issued by one of the white women without a seat as her way of passively resolving the issue was a brief and subtle bridge, but perhaps the most genuine of bridges built in this passage, untainted by words that offend more than help. The last bridge is extended by the large white man who tells the young black passenger challenged to give up his seat that the redheaded antagonist would have had to “slap me down first” and that he was “on [the black youth's] side.” Noble sentiments, certainly, but Griffin cannot help dwelling on how the man still called the black youth “boy” and points out in writing that the man had not stood up for them at any time before the slapping might have occurred (a valid observation, although one could of course ask why Griffin didn’t note to the man himself at the time when it could have added to the development of his black-friendly attitude).

Griffin is perhaps hard on others’ attempts to build bridges because he is going through an extreme project of bridge-building all on his own. For the most part, he is able to break through barriers from white to black after he undergoes his skin-color transformation, but he faces trouble being able to do everything he could do as a white man once in his role as a black man.

Griffin might have made his work more immediately acceptable to whites by not being as harshly critical as he was of their ignorance, callousness, bigotry, and hypocrisy. However, there was already too much nonsense such as that of Mississippi's politicians claiming that there was already excellent interracial harmony for any pandering or watering down of the facts to be able to have the effects necessary for eliminating the belief that the status quo could continue without demonstrating corrupted moral integrity. So Griffin's choice to take the critical high ground was appropriate for pushing for social change even though the awareness he created was an agitation to much of the USA, which then made things harder for his personal life.