Black for a day : white fantasies of race and empathy / Alisha Gaines.
"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...
Main Author: | |
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Language: | English |
Published: |
Chapel Hill :
University of North Carolina Press,
[2017]
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Subjects: | |
Physical Description: | xiii, 213 pages : illustrations |
Format: | Book |
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. |
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Call Number: | E185.625 .G35 2017 |
Bibliography Note: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
ISBN: | 9781469632827 1469632829 9781469632834 1469632837 |