Black for a day : white fantasies of race and empathy /
Gaines, Alisha,
Black for a day : white fantasies of race and empathy / Alisha Gaines. - Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, (c)2017. - 1 online resource.
Includes bibliographies and index.
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.
"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"--
9781469632841
Passing (Identity)--History--United States--20th century.
Impersonation.
Empathy--Political aspects.
African Americans--Social conditions--20th century.
Electronic Books.
E185 / .B533 2017
Black for a day : white fantasies of race and empathy / Alisha Gaines. - Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, (c)2017. - 1 online resource.
Includes bibliographies and index.
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.
"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"--
9781469632841
Passing (Identity)--History--United States--20th century.
Impersonation.
Empathy--Political aspects.
African Americans--Social conditions--20th century.
Electronic Books.
E185 / .B533 2017