Black Like Me Literary Elements

Autobiography

The action takes place in 1959 when John, with the help of one of his friends who was a dermatologist changed his skin tone for about six weeks. Jon records his experiences as a black man in New Orleans in a time dominated by hate and racial segregation.

The narrator is John, the man who wrote down in his diary his experience while living in the African-American community. He presents the events from a first-person subjective point of view.

Tragic, sad, violent, and sexual

The protagonist is John, a white man who altered his skin willingly to experience the racist remarks experience by the black people. The antagonists are the people who have extremist racial views.

The major conflict is between the whites and the African-American living in American in the 1950s. The novel tries to present the tensions between the two groups as impartially as possible.

The story reaches its climax quite early in the story, when John acquires the black skin he wants. From that point on, everything he writes about is just his experience as a black man.

When John first talks with a friend of his about his plans to change his skin, his friend warned him that he will encounter problems and he will be treated as a black man. This foreshadows that way John will be treated but also his inability to understand fully the reason why there are such tensions between the white population and the black one.

When John is warned that his family will also suffer because of his decisions proves to be an understatement because not only were they criticized, but their life was put in danger by various extremists groups. In the end John and his family were forced to leave the country for their own safety.

The action of the novel is set in a time of great turmoil, when the tensions between the whites and the blacks were escalating quickly. Rather than taking one side or another, the author chose to focus instead on the efforts made by well-intended people to change society. The author alluded through his diary entries that while there were many bad people in the society, there were also good men and women who tried to make a change and they should not be forgotten and disregarded as being unimportant.

It is important to analyze how black women and white women are portrayed in the novel. Black women are considered as being fair game by the white men and the men expect the black women to satisfy them sexually even if they may not want to. Black women are portrayed here as being warm bodies for the whites to use, being without a will on their own. White women, on the other hand, did not receive the same treatment. A black man was even scared to look at a white woman for too long, fearing that he may be accused of harassing her. A relationship between a white woman and a black man was seen as being abusive towards the white woman and the black man was portrayed as being a sexual predator who takes advantage of the white woman.

While John is interested in seeing how the blacks live and to understand them, he never really hints that he sat down with any of them and spoke personally with them. Paradoxically, despite being really interested in them, the things he knows about the African-Americans comes from reading about them in books and newspapers.

The hardest part for John was to change his identity, leave his family and start over in a new city. Even though the change lasted only a few weeks, it was a big change for him that he went through willingly. However, many black men and women did not have a choice and were forced to leave their families behind just to survive. The main character draws a parallel between his own feeling and what the average black man must be feeling while living in a world who considers them inferior by considering his own experience and his own feelings.

In the second diary entry, John describes his interaction with an unnamed white man who followed him and taunted him for being black. The white man here is used in a metonymical sense, being seen as a representative for the white culture and population as a whole.

In the eighth part "Here at noon, jazz blared from juke boxes and dark holes issued forth the cool odors of beer, wine and flesh into the sunlight. Here hips drew the eye and flirted with the eye and caused the eye to lust or laugh. It was better to look at hips than at the ghetto. ‘’