Word: griffins
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...Griffin's comment on this advertisement may be obvious, but it is worth recording. "In these matters the Negro has seen the backside of the white man too long to be shocked. He feels an indulgent superiority whenever he sees these evidences of the white man's frailty. This is one of the sources of his chafing at being considered inferior. He cannot understand how the white man can show him the most demeaning aspects of his nature and at the same time delude himself into thinking that he is inherently superior...
...little later in the book, Griffin is hitch-hiking through Mississippi. By day he can't find a ride--or a place to buy food, drink water, or urinate. At night, though, the white folk are only too glad to pick him up. They want to discuss sex with...
...your wife ever had it from a white man?" one opulent looking driver asks Griffin. When he says no, the driver politely changes his question: "Has she ever wanted it from a white...
...younger, more careful man tries to disguise the same species of question behind sociological technique. Happy to find a black man who is intelligent, he asks whether sex is better for Negroes in general than it is for white men. When Griffin replies that Negroes are people, with the same pleasures and the same fears as other people, the driver is unbelieving. He tells his passenger that Negroes have remained free from the scourge of Puritanism that has deadened the senses of the rest of the country. Griffin tries to explain how it is to live in a ghetto--that...
...Griffin's observations about his two drivers are more humane than one would have expected. He tries to see the first man as he must function among whites, a respected member of his community trying to be decent with his family and his friends. The second, he realizes, is neither consciously insulting him nor is he especially perverted. He simply cannot imagine that Negroes might be human beings...