ECU Libraries Catalog

Black for a day : white fantasies of race and empathy / Alisha Gaines.

Author/creator Gaines, Alisha author.
Format Book and Print
Publication Info Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2017]
Descriptionpages cm
Subject(s)
Contents 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.
Abstract "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 noteIncludes bibliographical references and index.
LCCN 2016046558
ISBN9781469632827 (cloth ; alk. paper)
ISBN1469632829 (cloth ; alk. paper)
ISBN9781469632834 (pbk. ; alk. paper)
ISBN1469632837 (pbk. ; alk. paper)
ISBN(ebook)

Available Items

Library Location Call Number Status Item Actions
Joyner General Stacks E185.625 .G35 2017 ✔ Available Place Hold