Class Unknown by Mark Pittenger

Author:Mark Pittenger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780814767405
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Greatest Divide: Science and Experience in Black Like Me

Since the 1890s, middle-class investigators had changed their clothes and plunged into the dark city; in 1959, a moderately successful white novelist blackened his skin with chemicals, a sun lamp, and dye, and then rode a New Orleans streetcar into the dark South. In doing so, John Howard Griffin brought to a culmination the process by which former class passers such as the fictitious Phil Green and the real Ray Sprigle had shifted their attention to religion and race—with the latter now defined almost exclusively by the line of color that divided black from white America. For Griffin, what Gunnar Myrdal had termed “the American dilemma” was now American society’s central problematic. It was, as he and some of his black interlocutors called it, simply “the problem.”20 And in postwar public and academic minds, the problem was coming to overshadow and subsume the issue of class. Poverty, with its assumed pathologies, increasingly became synonymous—however inaccurately—with blackness. As one reviewer of Black Like Me put it, Griffin had addressed “our number one social problem.”21

Like all previous down-and-outers, Griffin hoped to reshape public discourse by relying on the power of words to convey individual experience. More than any of his predecessors, he succeeded. His story—recounted first in a 1960 series of articles for the black-oriented magazine Sepia, then in his 1961 book Black Like Me and in its 1964 Hollywood version, and later recurred to in various writings and speeches—seized the public imagination and catapulted the monastically inclined writer into a largely unwonted public role during the climactic years of civil rights and Black Power agitation.22 During those years, the postwar liberal universalism that had motivated and framed both Gentleman’s Agreement and Black Like Me came under increasing scrutiny, resulting in—among many other social and cultural changes—the effective end of the classic era of undercover investigation. Griffin’s book pointed ahead to further experiments with identity, and to a continued cultural fascination with authentic experience, that would endure through the century’s close. But a heightened consciousness about the complexity of American identity, and a growing sensitivity to the perils of trying to speak for the other, reduced—though they did not eliminate—the appeal and the legitimacy of experiments in passing downward through the hierarchy of social power. Most later adventurers would neither seek nor find quite the same world of difference that had both enticed and repelled earlier generations of undercover explorers when they had set out to investigate poverty, work, and class in America.

While Griffin’s book presented itself as sui generis, it did culminate, if it did not precisely grow out of, a tradition of American texts concerned with racial passing—the greater part of which, running from the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, addressed the phenomenon of African Americans passing as white. Yet the line could also be crossed in the other direction, especially as the domain of color had once been considerably larger.23 From the beginnings of the undercover tradition in the Progressive

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