BLACK FOR A DAYPosted in Audio, Interviews, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2019-01-09 22:38Z by Steven |
Books, Beats, & Beyond
2019-01-06
Taj Salaam, Host
Today I’m talking with Alisha Gaines, about her book titled, “Black for A Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy”.
Contemporary history is littered with the surprisingly complex stories of white people participating in blackface and minstrelsy. At the end of their experiments in so-called “blackness,” Alisha Gaines argues, these debatably well-meaning white impersonators arrived at little more than false consciousness.
By examining this history of modern racial impersonation, Alisha Gaines shows that there was, and still is, a faulty cultural logic that places enormous faith in the idea that empathy is all that white Americans need to make a significant difference in how to racially navigate our society.
Alisha Gaines is assistant professor of English at Florida State University.
Listen to the interview (01:08:53) here.