c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ John Howard Griffin was an American original: An artist, philosopher, social activist and mystic, his life was a moral pilgrimage, a public exploration of the mysterious connections among body, conscience and soul.

Griffin was an uncompromising and courageous man: As a medical student in France working in an asylum, he experimented with using Gregorian chant to calm the terrors of the mentally ill. As Hitler’s army advanced across Europe, he joined the resistance, strapping Jewish children into straightjackets and smuggling them to safety disguised as mental patients.

When he was discovered, he fled to America and enlisted in the Army. Blinded by a combat wound, Griffin spent 10 years in darkness, writing novels, studying music, and understanding firsthand how the handicapped are made to feel as outcasts.

A convert to Catholicism and an intimate of the path-breaking monk Thomas Merton, Griffin severely and publicly criticized his church for its institutional racism. A mainstay of the early civil rights movement, he was burned in effigy in Fort Worth, Texas; he was beaten and nearly died at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. He engaged in racial reconciliation work and ultimately became of advocate of Black Power.

Today Griffin’s name is hardly mentioned when the stories of the civil rights movement are told. But his most public moral adventure, recorded in his 1961 book,”Black Like Me,”lives on.

Two years after his eyesight was inexplicably restored, Griffin decided to address America’s moral blindness by researching a question that had long troubled him: The large number of suicides among African-American males. Injecting himself with steroids and sitting under a sun lamp, he succeeded in staining his skin a dark walnut and set out to discover what it means to be a black man in America.”Black Like Me”became a worldwide best seller, awakening a generation not only to the daily indignities suffered by blacks in the South, but also to the gut-level racism that pervades all of American life _ even among so-called liberals.

Today, Griffin’s masquerade as a black man might strike some as a condescending, theatrical stunt. But Robert Bonazzi’s new book,”The Stranger in the Mirror”(Orbis Books) sheds new light on this elusive and little-known figure: A white man who made himself black and was forced to acknowledge his own racism in the loathing he felt when he encountered the image of his darkened self.

Less a biography than an illumination of Griffin’s original manuscript, Bonazzi’s book draws on Griffin’s later writings to present the untold spiritual and philosophical dimensions of his story. “I now wonder what we have been using for sight all these years, particularly those of us who live in the South, claiming to be in constant contact with blacks,”Griffin wrote, 18 years later.”I didn’t have to be in the black community an hour before the truth struck me. At the age of 35, I saw for the first time.” What Griffin saw and wrote about was appalling, from the little indignities of daily life, to the jobs denied and the”hate stares”of clerks and cops and bus drivers, who went out of their way to insult, debase and intimidate people of color.

Among the most offensive experiences were his encounters with white men as he hitchhiked along country roads in Alabama and Mississippi. Virtually every conversation with drivers who offered rides to the disguised Griffin was laced with verbal pornography _ questions about the supposed superior sexual prowess of black males; inquiries about the availability of black women; obscene sexual threats by men who considered themselves pillars of white community.”He spoke in a tone that sickened me, casual, merciless,”Griffin recalled.”I looked at him. His decent blue eyes turned yellow. I knew that nothing could touch him to have mercy once he decided a Negro should be `taught a lesson.’ The immensity of it terrified me.” Edited out of his original account, but restored in Bonazzi’s telling, was Griffin’s rage and his failure, really, to cease thinking like a white person and give himself up to the black experience:”It took all of my control not to reveal myself, not to say the words that formed inside me: Why, you sonofabitch, you’re not talking to a scared Negro. I’m as white as you are.” That comment touches the central discovery of Griffin’s journey into blackness and the root not only of overt racism, but of the buried racial prejudices that seem to permeate American society. Everyone harbors a version of this prejudice and the only remedy for racism, he believed, rests on a mystic’s vision of a basic human identity that transcends superficial differences _ gender, age, race, ethnicity, handicaps.”I believe that before we can truly dialogue in depth, we must first perceive that there is no Other, that Other is self, and that the I-and-Thou concept of Martin Buber must finally dissolve itself into the We concept,”Griffin wrote. “For him (Buber), the universals were not white or black or any color, not European or African or Asian, not male or female, not ancient or modern, but human.”It seems to me that this and this alone is the key that can unlock the prison of culture. It is also the key that will neutralize the poisons of the stereotype that allow men to go on benevolently justifying their abuses against other men.” Coming at a time when President Clinton has called for a renewed national dialogue on race, Bonazzi’s examination of the life of John Howard Griffin summons a voice from the past to join the conversation. Bonazzi believes it is a voice worth heeding.”If John Howard Griffin were here today, he would be appalled at what happened to the fight for civil rights,”Bonazzi said, in an interview.”Of course, `Black Like Me’ was the product of the segregationist era, which was a time of de facto slavery. And he in no way ever presented himself as a spokesman for blacks; he would present himself as a person appalled by the blindness of white people.”Today, we are in even deeper denial about racism than we were then,”Bonazzi said.”The culture of political correctness simply leads to deeper denial. Beneath the racial divide, we have a class struggle going on. Griffin would be appalled by the current levels of poverty, the gap between rich and poor. He hated busing and affirmative action, because he thought they were poor solutions.” Would John Howard Griffin participate in such a dialogue in today? In Bonazzi’s view, the conversation would have to be conducted on Griffin’s own uncompromising terms.”Dialogue, in Griffin’s terms, is a fraternal thing. It involves listening to the other voice, rather than thinking of what we’re going to say next,”Bonazzi explained.”It requires having a completely open mind. The risk today, with the idea of a national conversation on race, is that we’ll have multiple monologues, and no real dialogue.” MJP END CONNELL