In 1959, John Howard Griffin, a white journalist from Texas, had his skin artificially darkened so he could travel through the Deep South passing as a black man and report his experiences in his book Black Like Me.
An English-speaking journalist in Quebec in 2009 doesn't have to do anything that drastic to experience life on the other side of the language line. All he needs is an acquired habit of addressing strangers in French, and to keep his eyes and ears open.
And what he sees and hears makes it easier to understand why poll results published in The Gazette yesterday suggest a growing perception on the part of francophones that their language is threatened in Montreal ...