This is one of those classic questions in this game, and I’m kind of surprised at myself for not asking it sooner. And I say yes: I would change my race and, frankly, I’m kind of suspicious of people who wouldn’t – especially those I suspect are wary of losing any privilege they’ve been afforded by virtue of skin color. Also – if you’re playing along at home, can I remind you not to think of this question in terms of just black and white? When we talk about race, too often, we think only in those terms but – SURPRISE! – there are a lot of different races, and there exist subsets within those broad categories (if you’re not aware of this, you should get out more). This question asks if you’d trade in your skin color for any of the myriad other shades that exist. If you don’t say yes to this one for – fuck the million dollars – the incredible insight it would provide and the way it would inform your own life experience…you’re fucking lame. Sorry, but someone had to tell you sooner or later.
And for the record, there are even a handful of characters who change race in popular culture. Watermelon Man is a 1970 Melvin Van Peebles film about a white suburban executive who awakes one morning to find that he’s become black. William Connor from The Twilight Zone: The Movie is a racist asshole who suddenly finds himself a Jew pursued by Nazis in Vichy France; an African-American chased by the Klan in the 1950s American South; and a Vietnamese man nearly killed by U.S. soldiers in the midst of the Vietnam War. C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man plays Mark Watson, a wealthy white aspiring attorney who overdoses on tanning pills so he can steal a Harvard Law scholarship from its intended underprivileged black recipient. (The film was marketed using the holy-shit-I-can’t-believe-the-fucking-offensive-shit-you-could-get-away-with-in-the-’80s tagline “He didn’t give up. He got down.”) And, of course, the pièce de résistance is that brilliant old Eddie Murphy Saturday Night Live skit “White Like Me,” in which Murphy goes incognito as a white businessman and learns, most notably, that when no one else is around, white people “give things to each other for free,” have cocktail parties on city buses, and never make each other sign for bank loans (if you haven’t watched it, follow the link and do — for serious).
That skit, in fact, takes its title from the most famous real life race swap in history: Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin’s firsthand account of a six week period spent passing as a black man in the Deep South. In the autumn of 1959, Griffin – under the care of a dermatologist – spent a week taking heavy doses of medication and up to 15 hours a day beneath an ultraviolet lamp to convincingly darken his skin. For the next month and a half, he traveled throughout Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama – which sounds kinda scary now, so you can imagine the sitch just four years after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger and a mere four years before white supremacists bombed a black church in Birmingham, killing the four little black girls inside. What seems obvious today (Black + 1950s ÷ America + The South = A LOT OF RACISM) was groundbreaking information for both Griffin and white audiences at the time. In his temporary black skin, Griffin is unable to find an employer who will hire him, is nearly the victim of a violent racist attack, is called the “n word” an awful lot, and even has a hard time finding bathrooms he is allowed to use. Moreover, he documents an endless assortment of experiences in extreme humiliation, disdain and indignity, which stretch far beyond his expectations at the experiment’s outset. Following the book’s publishing in 1961 – and long after he had gone back to being white – angry racists in his hometown of Mansfield, Texas lynched an effigy of Griffin in the town’s center and began sending him death threats. Fearing for their safety, Griffin and his family packed up and high tailed it to Mexico for a short stint, settling ultimately in Fort Worth.
Black Like Me became a best seller and Griffin a frequent public speaker and defender of civil rights. A movie based on the book was released in 1964. Black Like Me remains a staple of high school reading lists.*
For the record, the oft-repeated rumors about Griffin’s death from skin cancer as a result of the drugs he took to undertake the project at the heart of Black Like Me are completely false. John Howard Griffin died in 1980 at age 60 of complications from diabetes.
