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 -- Epilogue : the last soul sister
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
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes
Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed March 30, 2017)
