Book Review: “Blue Like Me”
Scribner, $14.95
   What is the state of racial relations in our country today?  Has the civil rights movement of the 60s changed our mentality toward race significantly?  If not, can this intangibility ever be remedied?  These are the questions posed by Griff Johnson in “Blue Like Me.”
   Johnson, a 36-year-old white man, undergoes an ingenious sociological experiment: He shaves his head and covers it with blue grease paint, then goes out into Los Angeles to see if and how he is treated differently.
   One of Johnson’s first experiments is an attempt to get into an upscale restaurant.  Much to the shock of the reader, he is able to get in immediately, without a reservation, and without using words to ask to be let in.  The manager quickly takes him to “one of the best tables” and apologizes for the wait, which the author estimates at two to three minutes.
   Johnson later goes into a very expensive men’s clothing store, where he is instantly approached by employees wishing to help him.  They are all extremely polite, and they happily help him with his clothes, even though he is holding a large, spiraling monotonic tube-instrument that he plays constantly.
   The author’s conclusions about these events (and others) are, simply put, saddening.  Johnson believes that racism is still rampant in the minds of much of our citizenry; unfortunately, it is clear that this is the case.  This book cuts to the core of our culture, and is brilliant yet horrifying in its journey through our own brains.  Being accepted by “high society” just because of one’s skin color, bulging eyes, and possession of a bucket full of orange paint and tennis balls is merely a glimpse of the enlightening examples strewn throughout the painful revelation that is “Blue Like Me.”