Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy

Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy

Gaines, Alisha

Hardcover

Black American StudiesGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies

ISBN10: 1469632829
ISBN13: 9781469632827
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: May 8 2017
Pages: 230
Weight: 1.17
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
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, these debatably well-meaning white impersonators arrived at little more than false consciousness.

Complicating the histories of black-to-white passing and blackface minstrelsy, Gaines uses an interdisciplinary approach rooted in literary studies, race theory, and cultural studies to reveal these sometimes maddening, and often absurd, experiments of racial impersonation. By examining this history of modern racial impersonation, Gaines shows that there was, and still is, a faulty cultural logic that places enormous faith in the idea that empathy is all that white Americans need to make a significant difference in how to racially navigate our society.

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