Black for a day : white fantasies of race and empathy / Alisha Gaines.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gaines, Alisha, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Social conditions.

Empathy.

Passing (Identity).

History.

United States--Race relations--History--20th century.

United States.

Race relations.

Passing (Identity)--United States--History--20th century.

Impersonation.

Empathy--Political aspects.

African Americans--Social conditions--20th century.

African Americans.

Physical Description:

xiii, 213 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2017]

Summary:

"In 1948, journalist Ray Sprigle traded his whiteness to live as a black man for four weeks. A little over a decade later, John Howard Griffin famously 'became' black as well, traveling the American South in search of a certain kind of racial understanding. Contemporary history is littered with the surprisingly complex stories of white people passing as black, and here Alisha Gaines constructs a unique genealogy of 'empathetic racial impersonation' - white liberals walking in the fantasy of black skin under the alibi of cross-racial empathy. At the end of their experiments in 'blackness, ' Gaines argues that these debatably well-meaning white impersonators arrived at little more than false consciousness"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Good niggerhood : Ray Sprigle's Dixie terror

The missing day : John Howard Griffin and the specter of Joseph Franklin

A secondhand kind of terror : Grace Halsell and the ironies of empathy

Empathy TV : family and racial intimacy on Black. White.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781469632827

1469632829

9781469632834

1469632837

OCLC:

960278248