A television production company once offered me the opportunity to black up for money, by repeating the experiment that brought John Howard Griffin to prominence with the book, Black Like Me, published in 1961.
In 1959, Griffin started documenting his sojourn throughout the segregated southern states of America, while Jim Crow laws were still enforced, and with evidential prejudice a common occurrence for black Americans. Griffin was a white man who darkened his skin – with the aid of the drug methoxsalen – to temporarily experience life as a black man. His account became a magazine article, and later Black Like Me, which took its title from a line in a poem by Langston Hughes.
Had I taken up the offer, I would have been filmed in the north of England living with a black family, recording the ‘low level’ racism I was expected to encounter before returning, along with my natural pigmentation, to compare experiences.
My agent suggested the insurance premium would be extortionate. Had I ser…