DWARFISM:

Tomorrow marks the centenary of the writer and activist John Howard Griffin, who was born in Texas on June 16, 1920. His early life was marked by a number of diverse and remarkable experiences. But he is best remembered for his classic work Black Like Me, in which he described his experience in the winter of 1959 when he traveled to New Orleans, darkened his skin, shaved his head and "crossed the line into a country of hate, fear, and hopelessness--the country of the American Negro."

Perhaps the roots of Griffin's experience lay in his earlier 10-year experience of blindness--the result of a war injury. This experience prompted a deep spiritual journey that included his conversion to Catholicism. When his sight later miraculously returned, he was struck by how much superficial appearances can serve as obstacles to perception--allowing us to regard certain fellow humans as the "intrinsic other." This was especially obvious in the case of racism. Yet Griffin was struck by the frequent challenge from black friends: "The only way you can know what it's like is to wake up in my skin." He took these words to heart.

Griffin's book went beyond social observation to examine an underlying disease of the soul. His book was really a meditation on the effects of dehumanization, both for the oppressed and for the oppressors themselves. "Future historians," he wrote, "will be mystified that generations of us could stand in the midst of this sickness and never see it, never really feel how our System distorted and dwarfed human lives because these lives happened to inhabit bodies encased in a darker skin, and how, in cooperating with this System, it distorted and dwarfed our own lives in a subtle and terrible way."

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