A Brief History of Pretending to Be Black

Related Link White people have been passing for black for centuries. A historian explains.

Rachel Dolezal may have been the most audacious person to ever attempt to pass herself off as black, but she certainly was not the first. Here is a brief history of people, white and otherwise, pretending to be black.

1959: John Howard Griffin

Griffin, a white man, wrote a well-regarded book titled Black Like Me, in which he darkened his skin in order to pose as a black man in the segregated South. Griffin underwent medical procedures—including taking pills, grilling himself under a lamp and rubbing a stain into his body—in order to change the color of his skin.

Here (via The Guardian) is the passage from the book in which he describes seeing himself as “black” for the first time:

“In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger,” he writes, “a fierce, bald, very dark Negro glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me … I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I had no kinship … I looked into the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the white John Griffin’s past. No, the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness.”

Griffin ended up paying a physical toll for writing his book: several years after it was published, he was stopped on the side of a road with a flat tire when a group of white men came upon him and beat him with fists and chains.