Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy by Alisha Gaines (review)

With Rachel Dolezal's making news that no one could avoid in 2015, the analysis offered in Black for a Day is a gift. Alisha Gaines traces the history of "racial impersonation" while demonstrating that Dolezal is part of a tradition. Gaines reveals why the tradition endures, leaving readers to pass judgment on whether it is admirable.

Gaines traces a "genealogy of temporary black individuals operating under the alibi of racial empathy." Like scholarly predecessors, she finds that "empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion" (8). Because American culture overemphasizes the interpersonal while ignoring the structural, racial impersonators prove willing to "walk in someone else's skin rather than in their shoes" (10).

Gaines's four chapters render in-depth analyses of racial impersonations that yielded published narratives aligning with the belief that Americans value "cross-racial understanding." The journey begins with Ray Sprigle, a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for undercover investigative work and embarked on racial impersonation to win another. Gaines is therefore unequivocal: "the white impersonators in this genealogy are not passing; instead, they 'become black' only to exploit their temporary impersonations" (19). Sprigle's work is characterized by his purported desire to uncover racial violence but also by his refusal to risk experiencing any. His text therefore relies on what Gaines calls "Dixie Terror," which is mythical. After all, Dixie "cannot be found on a map" (22). Dixie Terror "exploits racism for its titillating marketability" (23). While emphasizing racism, Sprigle also admits that "in 4,000 miles of travel by Jim Crow train and bus and street car and by motor, I encountered not one unpleasant incident" (qtd. in Gaines 31). Gaines concludes: "Sprigle never learned what it meant to be a black man. Instead, he learned how to be a 'good nigger'" (31).

Chapter two analyzes perhaps the most famous racial impersonator, John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me (1961), which remains in print and has sold "over a million copies in fourteen languages" (66). Gaines examines the series of stories for Sepia magazine that describes Griffin's experiences as a Black man, the book-length follow-up, the film, and diary entries that expose what was never revealed in published writings. She thus offers a lengthened genealogy of the work, one that brims with unexpected details and insights.

For example, because the writers of the film version of Black Like Me had "access to Griffin's journals," the movie exposes what Griffin never admitted publicly—that he was sexually excited by the idea of his wife with his Black alter ego (75). Meanwhile, Griffin experiences unwanted sexual advances from Southern white men who take him to be Black, and Gaines's theoretical sophistication allows readers to understand the intrusions to a degree that Griffin himself may not have. Also, although Griffin's apparent capacity to be an ally to African Americans is limited, Gaines notes that "[u]nlike Sprigle, Griffin put himself in harm's way, relating the numerous consequences of his new black masculinity under the regimes of Jim Crow, including being hanged in effigy in his hometown of Mansfield, Texas, after he returned to whiteness" (81).

Gaines's understanding of how gender and sexuality intersect in lived experiences often reveals the limitations of racial impersonators' empathy for African Americans. In chapter three, readers learn that Griffin mentored the author of the next text to be examined, Grace Halsell's Soul Sister (1969). Halsell read Griffin's Black Like Me and pursued his guidance, which he lent throughout her journey. Ultimately living for six months as a Black woman, she spent time both in Harlem, New York and in Mississippi. Griffin had been queered while being perceived as Black, which creates for readers the opportunity for a nuanced understanding of how race inflects gender and sexuality as he guides his protégé. However, Halsell's socialization into white womanhood created a lens for...