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Reviewed by:
  • Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading by Kimberly Chabot Davis
  • Cameron Leader-Picone
Kimberly Chabot Davis. Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 272pages. $95.00 (cloth). $30.00 (paper).

Kimberley Chabot Davis’s new book Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading argues that engagement with diverse authors can make for more empathetic and politically transformative white readers. Davis’s book is a timely analysis of the relationship between audience reception and antiracist action in the context of efforts like We Need Diverse Books to diversify publishing and reading practices as a way to enable empathy and equality. Davis’s argument goes beyond the claim that educating whites in African American history and culture can lead to antiracist reading practices to say that antiracist reading is one part of white engagement with African American culture more broadly. [End Page 104] Furthermore, she argues that such engagement has the capacity to generate antiracist cultural production of its own. Davis’s book valuably crosses media forms to discuss consumption and production of music, film, and literature. Her methodologies range from the analysis of works themselves to ethnographic research with book clubs and the analysis of reader responses in both online forums and within a classroom setting. Across this range of media and sites of engagement, Davis locates the antiracist reading she argues for in an empathy that “creates the possibility for self-alienation by encouraging viewers to read themselves and to critique their own social position and alliances” (11). In other words, Davis seeks to resuscitate empathy as a politics that enables a process of disidentification from whiteness on the part of white viewers/listeners/readers, with the potential to generate antiracist activism and movements.

At the heart of the distinction is what Davis calls a “chicken or the egg question”: “Does politicization follow from reading, or vice versa?” (106). This question of causation, however, remains underexplored in the body of the book. Davis poses this question about whether engagement with African American literature has helped politicize the elderly women of a particular book group or whether their already-present progressive politics has led to their reading practices. It would seem impossible to argue that it is one instead of the other, as both reading practices and politics surely interrelate. However, in terms of Davis’s larger thesis that an “empathetic perspective can be acquired by sustained reading and viewing of black-produced texts that provide a critical lens to examine white privilege and institutional racism” (152), it seems critical to argue for the literature’s direct impact on the politicization of white audience members.

Davis’s title nods to the emphasis on appropriation in discussions of white consumption of black culture. Whether celebrating the liberation provided by such appropriation or condemning it, such discussions tend to privilege white experiences. Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” famously argued that young white men were looking to black culture in the postwar era to address the nihilism and fear of the early Cold War and atomic age. In that essay, Mailer celebrates black culture for its transgression of social norms, arguing that it represents an ironically greater freedom because structures of white supremacy exclude blacks from full participation in society. Because of this, white “hipsters” gain freedom through their embrace of black culture. As Davis notes, Eric Lott famously described the relationship between white performers and white audiences with black culture and black people as “love and theft.” Similarly, black writers such as Greg Tate have argued that white hip-hop listeners and performers take on “everything but the burden” of being black in America.

Davis inserts her book into this larger discourse to push against arguments focused on problematic aspects of the relationship between white performers and consumers and black cultural production. In contrast, she argues that [End Page 105] privileging such arguments imagines a monolithic white audience and forecloses legitimate avenues of antiracist reading and engagement. Or, to put it as Davis does at one point, too much of the investigation into the dichotomy of “love and theft” focuses on appropriation and neglects the real transformations...

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