86 Quotes by John Howard Griffin

He told me how all of the white men in the region craved colored girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework and in his business. “And I guarantee you, I’ve had it in every one of them before they ever got on the payroll.” A pause. Silence above humming tires on the hot-top road. “What do you think of that?” “Surely some refuse,” I suggested cautiously. “Not if they want to eat – or feed their kids,” he snorted. “If they don’t put out, they don’t get the job.

We need a conversion of morals,” the elderly man said. “Not just superficially, but profoundly. And in both races. We need a great saint-some enlightened common sense. Otherwise, we’ll never have the right answers...

The core concept in Griffin’s writings about racism – that members of dominant groups tend to view minorities, because they seem different in some extrinsic way, as intrinsically other, and “as merely underdeveloped versions of their own imprisoning culture” – was intuited in Black Like Me and articulated in a seminal essay, “The Intrinsic Other.

Existence nullified by men; reaffirmed by nature.

In Black Like Me, I tried to establish one simple fact, which was to reveal the insanity of a situation where a man is judged by his skin color, by his philosophical “accident” – rather than by who he is in his humanity.