Bet you didn't think that a book titled Black Like Me would be written by a white guy. We know. He tricked lots of people: that's why he's famous.

This trickster's name is John Howard Griffin and he published Black Like Me in 1961, just three years after his 1959 experiment passing for a black man. He kept a diary to document his experiences, and turned his 188-page story into a series of articles for Sepia magazine. And what happened then? Stuff got real.

Let's back up a bit. What's the big deal, you say? Let's just say that it wasn't a walk in the park to be a southern black man in the late 1950s. Actually, it gave Griffin nightmares that would wake him up screaming in the middle of the night even after the experiment was over. So yeah: not fun times.

It seems obvious to us now, but there were a lot of people at the time (we'll call them racists) who didn't want anyone to know how badly black people were treated. This was, of course, right at the turn of the Civil Rights Movement. Griffin had told the racist's secret to the whole world: black people were being treated abysmally.

So what stuff got real? Well, when Griffin first published the book he had many supporters. He actually became kind of a celebrity for a while. But not everyone was so happy about his hijinks, and they showed it: an effigy of him was burned in his hometown right in the middle of the street, and people threatened to castrate him. Things got so bad that his family moved to Mexico to get away from the threats.

Despite (or maybe even because) of all the craziness surrounding Griffin's experiment, Black Like Me is his most famous, successful, and controversial book. Griffin is no slacker, and it was only his fourth book out of thirteen, but this is the one that people remember. It's also the one that was turned into a film in 1964. We'd say that means it was pretty popular.

For his truly immersive investigative journalism, Griffin was awarded The National Council of Negro Women Award in 1960, and the Pacem in Terris award in 1964. Not too shabby for a dude who had been blind up to two years before (seriously!) he set out on his incognito experiment.

You should care about Black Like Me if you're Caucasian. Or if you're African American/Black. Or if you're East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Latino/Hispanic, Pacific Islander, Native America/ Pacific Islander, or Other.

Basically, whatever box you tick on government forms, you should care about Black Like Me. Hey, even if you've shredded up government forms and run off to live in the wilderness with a pack of wolves and eat raw meat and howl at the moon… you should still care about Black Like Me. No ethnicity is exempt from caring about this stunning work of nonfiction.

Why? Because all of humanity is implied in the central argument of Black Like Me: that all people, regardless of race, deserve to be treated fairly and equally and respectfully. And that you don't get to assume anything about a race other than your own until you've walked at least a miles in their shoes.

John Howard Griffin should know, because he walked, bussed and hitchhiked through hundreds of miles of the American South disguised as a black man. And this dude wasn't a saint—he thought he was setting out on a hijinks-filled adventure to explore the merry lifestyle of the fun-loving African American. Yeah, he learned his lesson. He was shocked by the hatred he was met with while disguised as a black man.

And he got to thinking: what is race, anyway? Where are the boundaries of race, and why on earth are we so keen on defining and classifying people based on the color of their skin? How much of race is nature and how much is nurture? What makes us all fundamentally human?

Yeah. It gets deep.

Black Like Me is filled with these kinds of questions: questions that leave you staring into the cosmos (or just down a crowded subway car) and thinking Big Thoughts. But it's also written in layman's terms: Griffin wanted everyone to read this book and be able to ponder questions about race, hatred, love, and humanity.

And no one—not one human being—gets out of caring about these questions and their implications. Not even if you've run off to live as a hermit among the wolves.