Black Like Me and Crash
Black Like Me and Crash In 1959 John Howard Griffin, the author of the book Black Like Me, disguised himself as an African American and decided to go live out in society to see what it would be like to be a black man. The book Black Like Me is his documentation of that experience. His story spread around the world and he got a lot of praise from people around the world, but he also got a good amount if hate from the white power groups who were quite prevalent at the time. Now, much time has passed and many people say the days of racism are over. That is a completely untrue statement. The movie Crash depicts modern day racism and shows how prevalent it really is in today’s society. Both of these works can relate to one another in many ways and really show how racism truly is. The book Black Like Me and the film Crash have many connections that can be drawn to one another. For one, the main focus of the two works is racism, but they take place in very different times. Black Like Me takes place back when racism was very blatant and obvious. Crash shows how modern day racism is not a blatant, but still very prevalent in deeply held stereotypes and beliefs. Although Black Like Me only focuses of African Americans and Crash is on all races they are still related. The stereotype that African Americans are more aggressive and violent is seen in both of the works. Another interesting thing that is seen in both of the works is that there is one character who disregards his race just to rise higher and become accepted socially. In Black Like Me this character is Christophe, who is a well dressed black man who seems to hate his own race and he stands up for the white people and wants to be one of them. In Crash the character that represents this is the police chief. He hears about how one officer has racist tendencies but he disregards them because he says that it will look bad on his record if there are racist police officers under a “black man’s” command. There are