Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin

In “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin identifies how conflict management greatly changes after he undergoes a drastic lifestyle change to discover the truth of how people are categorized by their skin color and not their own character. Griffin undergoes an experiment in order to allow him to study and elaborate on racial boundaries that still exist during the 1950″s. Griffin, almost immediately realizes segregation and low self-esteem caused by the feeling of being hated due to the color of your skin. The conflict management in the book changes drastically after his pigment is changed and he is no longer part of a privileged white American society, and now he his part of a hated society due to physical differences that make them seem inferior to the dominate race.
Griffin”s conflict management style greatly changes after he undergoes his experiment. At the beginning of his journey, he was very aggressive, and took things for granite such as eating in restaurants and using public facilities. After he changes his pigmentation it changes his conflict management due to what he is succumbed to because of the change in the variation of his skin color. The only conflict management skills he had were the ones he learned by watching others who were adapted to the
Society. For instance, “blacks see themselves as inferior to whites because of the society they live in”. For example, ” on the bus ride to Mississippi, Griffin encounters a man who black on the outside, and tries to think of himself as part of the white culture and hopes when he dies, the white part of his soul shall go to heaven”. Griffin conflict management is passive in the end only because he is observing and he doesn”t want to draw attention to himself, which might get him into trouble.

Griffin”s conflict management is arbitrary because he is no longer what he was before the experiment and knows he is going to have to live like a black male for the rest of his natural life.