Bob Franken

Racial Misunderstanding

Maybe it’s time for a modern-day John Howard Griffin to write another “Black Like Me.” In 1959, Griffin, a white man, medically darkened his skin. He spent six weeks traveling through the rigidly segregated Deep South and kept a journal of his experiences as a black man. In the bestseller he wrote afterward, he described how accustomed he became to the “hate stare” he constantly got from whites.

Fifty-four years later, it has been replaced by the “fear stare,” according to most blacks and other dark-skinned males of succeeding generations, including the man who became p...