Empathy TV

The fourth chapter takes on the televisual rescripting of Sprigle, Griffin, and Halsell with a reading of the FX cable series, Black.White., a 2006 reality television show where two middle class families—one black and one white—“switched” races to experience racial difference. This chapter attends to how Black.White. moves the genealogy of empathetic racial impersonation from the theatrical stage, newspaper, trade books, and film to the visual logics of television. This shift reveals an investment in empathetic racial impersonation at a moment dominated by the changing discourses about race and race relations in the 21st century. Importantly, this chapter expands discussions of racial experimentation beyond the U.S. South. Set in Los Angeles, this “reality” show spuriously reinscribes the black/white binary even though Los Angeles has long been recognized as a multiracial city. By focusing on the fraught relationship between the two families, this chapter contends that Black.White. dramatically exposes the limits of empathetic racial experimentation as a tool of racial reconciliation. Ultimately, it evidences an empathetic failure in the cross-racial promise supposedly demonstrated by this seemingly new, but ultimately decades old, impersonation experiment. It also considers the histories and politics of whiteface.

A Second hand Kind of Terror

Chapter Three considers the political, racial, and social crises plaguing the late 1960s by reading Soul Sister, Grace Halsell’s 1969 memoir. A freelance journalist and a White House staff writer for the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, Halsell was also a protégé of John Howard Griffin, who famously passed for black in 1959. While previous scholarship on Griffin has wrestled with his place as an enduring icon of racial empathy, this chapter details Griffin’s previously unknown mentorship of Halsell. Bolstered by extensive archival research, this chapter demonstrates how Halsell prepared for her performance of black womanhood by relying exclusively on Griffin’s instruction without any advice from black women. The chapter also situates Halsell’s blackness within important discussions around the contentious relationship between racial equality and 2nd wave feminism. Ultimately, Halsell’s six-months as a black woman in Harlem and Mississippi during the burgeoning black power movement ironically reveals grotesque assumptions about black sexuality, authenticity, and class.

The Missing Day

This chapter considers the iconic, cross-racial impersonator, John Howard Griffin, author of the bestselling Black Like Me (1961). This chapter uses archival research to reveal how Griffin prepared for his temporary (mis)adventures in Southern blackness, first published in a six-part series in the now defunct, black periodical, Sepia. Before those articles, Griffin wrote about his experiment in his personal journals. Close-reading those journals uncovered Griffin’s secret black persona, “Joseph Franklin.” Written in an unpublished Halloween journal entry, known in this book as the “missing day, this chapter centers that entry.” It reads Griffin’s later success in cross-racial empathy through the spectral persona of Joseph, an imagined identity on which Griffin projected anxieties about black masculinity, and his dread about his impending temporary blackness. This chapter details how the haunting absence of Joseph and the missing October 31, 1959, journal entry structure each iteration of Griffin’s empathetic racial impersonation—from his journals and articles for Sepia to the literary and film versions of Black Like Me. By tracing this strategic avoidance, Griffin’s archive uncovers the imagined spectre of black masculinity shaping the most iconic example of empathetic racial impersonation in this genealogy.

Good Niggerhood

This chapter considers the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ace reporter Ray Sprigle’s four weeks traveling through the Jim Crow South “passing for black” in 1948. In the subsequent 21-part series, “I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days,” Sprigle writes how he is desperate to experience and document the most extreme aspects of Southern racism or “Dixie terror;” however, Sprigle only managed to “yessir” his way throughout the South becoming what he calls a “good nigger.” After Sprigle failed to experience the Dixie terrifying racism he needed to validate his experiment, the chapter argues that “good niggerhood,” a performance of cautious and respectable, black masculinity, undermined the integrity and ultimate goals of his project. The chapter argues that Sprigle attempted to save his failing racial expedition by parroting the language of iconic sentimental texts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The chapter then uses James Baldwin’s trenchant critique of sentimental literature, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” to expose a cultural overinvestment in this kind of racial experiment.

Introduction

The Introduction begins with a personal anecdote. Unaware of the complicated politics of racial impersonation, Gaines blackened a fellow student for her high school’s revival of the 1947 Broadway musical, Finian’s Rainbow. In the musical’s complicated plotline, magically becoming black for a day was the only corrective remedy to the racism of a white, Southern legislator terrorizing his constituents. Moving from the personal to a close reading of Finian’s Rainbow, the introduction establishes the postwar temporality and theoretical scaffolding for the rest of the book. The introduction establishes the link between these racial experiments in temporary blackness and the politics of American liberalism by considering Gunnar Myrdal’s influential sociological tome, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. In it, Myrdal concluded that the solution to the “Negro problem” “rested in the heart and mind of the [white] American.” This false conclusion enabled the genealogy of “empathetic racial impersonation” detailed in the rest of the book. It argues these racial experiments come into vogue when the United States, as an emerging, postwar superpower, attempts to understand its racial past, present, and future. It then unpacks how and why empathetic racial impersonation resurges during moments of racial and sociopolitical crisis.

Epilogue

This Epilogue considers the curious case of Rachel Dolezal, a born white woman publically outed for passing for black in 2015. The story quickly went viral and ignited a controversial debate around race, authenticity, identity, and what some wrongly call “transracial.” Unlike the previous impersonators discussed in this book, Dolezal is singular in her defiant, fake blackness. Ultimately, the Epilogue argues that Dolezal continues to exercise the privilege of her assumed, American birthright—to define and redefine herself, Gatsby-style. It is an exercise poking holes in the conclusion to this book’s Introduction, the assumption that “once you go black, you go back.” Instead, Dolezal reminds how blackness can be seductive, provocatively indexing a rather wonderful idea about blackness and authentic black embodiment. This Epilogue argues that, even in its vulnerability, pain, and suffering, blackness is an identity worth performing and pursuing. In a strange way, born white Dolezal’s stubbornly insistent blackness confirms the importance and value of “real” black lives.