Your first thought upon cracking open this biographical work is, "Wow, I can't believe this was written in 1959! This could be about [insert current year here]!" I mean, after your actual initial thought of, "I'm reading a piece of culturally significant material that enlightens me to the world beyond my own backyard, go me!"
But as the story develops, cultural implications give way to a bland overview of 1960's Deep South racism, spectral division, and a sense of hatred that would be powerful and life-altering had the story execution been even remotely interesting.
What would have ordinarily been a rather quick read ended up dragging on slower than the buses that begrudgingly carted Mr. Griffin around Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and the like. Distantly telling of the obstacles he encountered after altering his white skin to become black - colored bathrooms miles away from convenient, denied cups of coffee or glasses of water, looks of disgust from obvious strangers - Mr. Griffin spoke more of the general segregation and corresponding consequences of blacks - oftentimes horrific - than of his own, often horrific, experiences. And although they were shocking in nature, Griffins' portrayal of them was distant, vague, and lacked the sort of intensity one would expect from a white man going from his seemingly privileged existence to the suppressed, harsh life of a 1960's Negro man; especially coming from his own personal journal.
Afforded the luxury of being able to switch from black to white skin, Griffin instead wasted it by describing his experiences is generic prose, as if he were standing outside a window looking in. Constructed as his personal journal throughout his seven-week experiment, his freedom to paint a more specific picture of 1960's racial injustice was supremely wasted, though he was still subjected to his own brand of racism once the experiment was made public. Not until the epilogue, which I almost didn't read, did Mr. Griffin delve deep into what his experiment revealed, why, and any possible moves toward national harmony, though he stopped short of making any actual suggestions.
Obviously this work was culturally significant in it's 1960's publication, and is still relevant today, which is both sad and promising. Sad because we're dealing with the same issues as a nation over 50-year later, and promising because although racial harmony alludes us, and springs up in new, ugly ways, our ability to recognize the problem of judging someone based on skin color alone is what separates us from the animals. But, if we're being honest, animals have us beat in this area; I've never seen a dog attack another dog simply for being black.
