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.
Alisha Gaines is assistant professor of English at Florida State University.
"While Gaines is an adept close reader of the white unconscious and of literary narrative, she also demonstrates a keen understanding of historical contexts that shape debates about race from the 1940s to the present. [...] In doing so, Gaines’s work admirably demonstrates a multidisciplinary American studies methodology. [...] Black for a Day offers convincing and important analysis of the failures of white allies and skewers facile claims of cross-racial alliance, and in that way participates in a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” uncovering racism lurking within narratives of seemingly liberal whiteness." — ALH Online Review, XXVI.1 (2018)
