Book Review: Fake Empathy in Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy by Alisha Gaines (University of North Carolina Press, 2017: 212 pp)

This reviewer is inclined to compare Black for a Day to Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece “The Last Supper.” Leonardo’s painting was a fresco, which is made by applying paint to wet plaster. The plaster for Leonardo’s fresco did not dry properly and the painting began to peel almost immediately. The painting has had to be continuously patched up ever since then. Leonardo’s masterpiece “The Last Supper” has, therefore, been called “a magnificent wreck.” So is this book, Black for a Day. 

Black for a Day paints an engaging and indeed fascinating picture of individuals (most but not exclusively white) who try to masquerade, to “pass as,” to impersonate, black people. It is a page-turner and eye-opening. Parts of it are confronting, and definitely not for the faint of heart. The short review: if one begins with pretense, deception, and inauthenticity as input, then one gets pretence, deception, inauthenticity—and fake empathy—as output. Black for a Day, as indicated, includes a fascinating account of what amounts to social psychology experiments gone bad. White people putting on the equivalent of black face, pretending to be black, is a bold experiment, which, however engaging as a kind of misguided role playing, does not work as designed or intended. Yet, such a mixed result no more invalidates a rigorous and critical empathy than that Roman soldiers hammered nails into the limbs of the people they were crucifying invalidates carpentry. The entire matter is nuanced and complex and the longer review follows.

Alisha Gaines, professor of English at Florida State University, begins with a personal reflection on her participation her high school’s production of the Broadway hit musical Finian’s Rainbow in 1996. Now Finian’s Rainbow was a Broadway musical first produced with considerable success in 1947. It is a fairy tale, including a pot of gold, a leprechaun, and a mythic creature with green skin. I acknowledge that I need to get out more, and I thank Professor Gaines for calling Finian’s Rainbow to my attention. 

Finian’s Rainbow was made into a major motion picture in 1968 directed by Francis Ford Coppola staring Petula Clark (her hit song “Downtown” was a “hit”) and Keenan Wynn. The main action occurs when a racist US Senator modeled on the historical Theodore G. Bilbo, but reminding me of Jesse Helms, another notorious racist in the US Senate, is magically turned into a black person. This magically transformed Senator gets to walk in the shoes of the despised, devalued Other, presumably while singing various Broadway hit show tunes. As Black for a Day properly points out the empathy is “painted on.” Furthermore, if the empathy lessons were so well learned by the racist senator, then why was he so eager to be transformed back into a white person (which he is as part of a happy ending)? Unconscious biases, white fantasies, and prejudice, strike again! They continue to do so in the remaining, non-fictional, chapters. 

One may say, prejudice is prejudice and all prejudices are alike, and there would be truth to that. Yet when one looks at the dynamics of prejudice, one cannot simply substitute the underlying dynamics of racism against black people for antisemitism or sexism or for homophobia.

The fantasy of black hyper masculinity is repressed as a source of anxiety challenging the white male’s (imagined) inadequate sexual potency. It then gets reversed and projected onto the devalued Other, who comes at the white man as white woman’s desire for the stereotyped hyper sexed black man

For example, Elisabeth Young-Breuhl. (1996). The Anatomy of Prejudices: page 367:

“The white male’s mythological contractions of black male sexuality – the images of Negro phallic power, animal lust, and rapaciousness – signal the jealousy and resentment over the black’s defilement pleasure, and they also reflect the white male’s anxiety that white women really desire the black’s aggressive sexuality.” 

In contrast to the hysterical fantasy of the over-dramatized black male, the Jewish person is made the target of an obsessional paranoid over-intellectualization – the totally fictional worldwide conspiracy of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion. In the case of homophobia, one stays with the dynamic of difference for one has to project that, in a certain sense, the boy finds other boys attractive, in that special sexual way, and must defend against being a “fag” be perpetrating acts of aggression. Nor should the sexism and misogyny be overlooked. In the case of the prejudices of racism (in the narrow sense against blacks) and antisemitism the devalued, despised Other becomes the target of projections one of own inner black and jew in every imaginable positive and negative sense. The differences collapse – inwardly I am the despised Other and get rid of the negative value by externalizing it. In the sexism, the anatomical difference between the sexes is such that the difference is impossible to deny, so the Other must be denied, deleted, “killed,” in order to reestablish integrity of the self. In the prejudices stereotype, the Other – the woman in this case – is hated for being inferior cognitively, physically, and so, even as the male harbors a certain womb envy. One should try to keep these complex, simultaneously changing variables in mind in confronting, deconstructing, and debunking prejudices of all kinds (see Young-Breuhl 1996 for a magisterial account). Meanwhile – 

The main action of Black for a Day leaves the Finian fairy tale behind, in order to engage with confronting racial stereotypes—the “white fantasies of race” called out in the book’s subtitle—such as the stereotype of the hyper-sexed black Mandingo male and the morally loose black woman, fantasies everyone. However, the main fantasy that “racial impersonation” brings forth is empathy. The narrative of Black for a Day consists in critically reviewing several non-fiction narratives of individuals, born Caucasian, who go “under cover,” changing the color of their skin cosmetically and chemically from white to black, in order to “pass” as African American while travelling in the American south (or, in one case, Harlem) in the late 1940s and 1950s. Ray Sprigle, John Howard Graham, Grace Halsell, the cast of a Fox Reality TV show called Black.White (the latter show bring an exception in premiering in the year 2006) engage in what may be described as a bold, though misguided, experiment in social psychology (my terms, not Gaines’). This is supposed to produce empathy between the races and/or in white people for black people, but what it actually produces is fake empathy. Key term: fake empathy (once again, my term, not Gaines’).

On background, the reader may usefully recall that Finian’s Rainbow is a Broadway musical written in 1947. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, making Jim Crow laws illegal. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, giving counties with majority black populations the ability to register to vote and elect their own sheriffs, a much-needed step in the direction of obtaining social, political, and criminal justice. The importance of this step should not be under-estimated, even as much work remains to be done today (2023), and as the US Supreme Court orders appointing a Special Master to redraw Alabama’s racially gerrymandered Congressional districts. Nor should one overlook that Wikipedia reports that one of the last lynchings occurred in Mobile, Alabama, on March 21, 1981 of Michael Donald. One perpetrator Henry Hays was executed by electric chair for the crime in 1997, one year after Gaines’ high school production of the fairy tale. Tough stuff, and not for the faint of heart. Nevertheless, this is on background and is not mentioned, though arguably implicated, in Black for a Day.

The motives of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, and so on, were as diverse as the individuals themselves. Ray Sprigle was a Pulitzer Prize (1938) winning journalist, whose muck-raking writing tended to be sensationalist, emphasizing what Black for a Day describes as “Dixie-terror” against blacks while ignoring discrimination in the North. Gaines properly points out that Sprigle had a blind spot around the fact that black people were the victims of discrimination even in Northern States. In that context, however, this reviewer finds Black for a Dayproblematically asserting: “Although Sprigle’s original motivation was his career, he does his part to fulfill Myrdal’s dogma,” referring to Gunnar Myrdal’s An America Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944 (2 vols)). 

The reader may usefully recall that Myrdal’s work was originally published in 1944, and Sprigle had started his experiment in 1947. Readers had little time to engaged the 1500 pages much less make it into a dogma in those three years. Myrdal’s two volume work cannot be summarized here, but one important challenge that it made to its readers was to stop being hypocrites, pretending to “all men (persons) are created equal,” while perpetrating Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and other forms of oppression and prejudice. That Myrdal’s work has become accepted “dogma,” notwithstanding its historical limitations in the eighty years since it was published is not an entirely bad thing. If this be dogma, stop being hypocritical, then make the most of it. Finally, to imply that the journalist, Sprigle, had some sort of career conflict of interest for wanting to win another Pulitzer Prize is concerning. This is not a conflict of interest – this is a journalist trying to do his job. The extent of his success is, of course, an open question.

Meanwhile, Myrdal needs no defense from me (nor am I capable of one here), but Myrdal does need one from Black for a Day, which charges him, accurately enough, with not having innovated in the matter of African-American History and/or Academics (p. 43), and, less charitably, of appealing to the consciences of the white people (p. 10) with his accusation of hypocrisy instead of advocating for Black Power (my use of the term at this point, not Gaines’) through economic, politics, and legislation. However, while I might be mistaken, a cursory find function using the Internet Archive of Mydral’s work disclosed hits on W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and E. Franklin Frazier, the “erasure” of whose academic labor Black for a Day accuses Myrdal of having enacted (2017: 43; Myrdal 1944 passim). No pass on that one. The references were already there in the 1944 edition. It is hard not to be cynical – 1500 pages and still not enough footnotes, nor does Myrdal have the distinction “Critical Race Theory”! 

Myrdal maintained that northern whites were, in effect, living in their all-white enclaves, ignorant of the struggles of Negro citizens and would-be citizens. With that in mind, the flurry of journalist activity exemplified in Black for a Day by Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, etc., might usefully be redescribed as attempting to address informatively the white ignorance, the depths of which we have still not exhausted, with their respective journalistic reportage and social psychology undercover work. Black for a Day makes it sound like one has to decide between morality and empathy versus economics and legislative action. Why would someone force a choice like that? Don’t we need all of the above? 

By the way, a search of Myrdal using the find function does not disclose a single occurrence of “empathy” or “cross racial empathy” or “cross-racial empathy” (note the hyphen), though the word “segregation” does get 592 matches and “Southern” over a thousand. So, Myrdal was fighting a different battle. Or was he? As noted, in Q2 2023 the Alabama State legislation had its gerrymander voting districts declared invalid by Supreme Court – again. Presumably a federal judge will be appointing a Special Master to complete redistricting to allow for another black-majority Congressional District. It is not only microaggressions, which Gaines calls out as having endured, that are troubling (though they are surely that). Macroaggressions are concerning, too.

Still, it is never simple to distinguish cause and effect, and the informal social psychology experiments of “passing,” going under-cover, and assuming a false identity, present a tangle of issues. Black for a Day tries to disentangle them by committing to the position that such impersonations resulted in false consciousness – the illusion of racial understanding. Disagree. On the contrary, this reviewer allows for the likelihood that, especially between 1947 and 1965, a significant number of white folks, including some of my grandparents’ and parents’ generations, found their appreciation of the struggles for social justice and against racial prejudice to be expanded by these journalist “exposés,” notwithstanding their limitations. As for causes, the passing of the Voting Rights Act was caused, in the strict sense, by the fact that the Democratic Party had a super majority in the US Congress and were able to surmount the filibuster of the Southern Segregationists. That was the cause. Full stop. The rest is speculation. It turned out that President Johnson (LBJ) was a closet progressive (but, unfortunately, not on foreign policy). 

Meanwhile, John Howard Graham was a Saint of Empathy (my term, not Gaines’). Graham escaped from genteel Southern privilege in north Texas to study in France at the age of fifteen, going on to study psychiatry in France. According to Gaines, after studying psychiatry, Graham helped to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis by pretending they were mentally ill and sending them abroad. In the US Army in World War II, Graham was knocked head-over-heels unconscious by a near miss of an artillery explosion. The head trauma left him blind. Graham spent ten years learning to function as a blind person before seemingly miraculously regaining his sight. 

As near as I can understand the story, Graham’s project of studying racial prejudice led him to send out a questionnaire as part of what amounted to a seat-of-the-pants social psychology experiment on what it was like to be black. Most of the response were blank – arguably an expression of contempt – but a few black responders insisted he would not understand what black people were experiencing without “getting inside the skin” of the black person. Even if it was a “hair-brained” idea to try to change his racial identity, on my reading, Graham was a man of integrity with a lot of social scientific (and psychiatric) curiosity and no more unconscious bias than the population as a whole.

Never was it truer, correlation is not causation. Meanwhile, John Howard Graham’s memoire was made into a move Black Like Me in 1964, staring the well-known actor James Whitmore. As Black for a Day points out, Whitmore’s make-up looked fake – Gaines’ text has photos – as if he had escaped from a minstrel show in black face. However, the outrages depicted in his encounters with segregation and racism, even though clumsily enacted, were real enough and helped stoke the outrage of the audiences against injustices, social, political, and legal. 

In every case, Springle, Graham, Sewell, and the Fox reality TV show Black.White, appear to this reviewer like social psychology experiments that go off the rails, even as they become eye-opening paradigms of the apartheid-like status of black people in 1947, including the unconscious bias of both the investigators and their subjects, and the near delusional fantasies of the families on the Fox Reality TV show Black.White (2006). (Note “Black.White TV” is also a pun since TV was broadcast only in black and white until color TV because common around 1966 in the States.) There is a long history in social psychology of experiments “blowing up” and failing, albeit in ways that are more engaging than most standard social psychology outcomes that differentiate some obscure distinction by a percentage or two. 

As regards social psychology experiments that go off the rails, the reader may recall Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison experiment. Severely criticized for ethical and scientific lapses, this experiment divided research subjects into Prisoners and Jailers and then took extensive notes on what happened. The experiment had to be stopped as the jailers became sadistic, abused their power, and the prisoners were getting ready to revolt violently. 

In another experiment that was not stopped, but some wish it had been, Stanley Milgram (1963) gives the research subjects a device to deliver electric shocks if the remoted learner in the other room gives the wrong answer. The electric shocks are fake. There were no real shocks administered and the supposed learner subjects were “confederates,” part of the research staff. However, the willingness to follow orders was shocking (no pun intended) as people obeyed commands from the white-lab-coat-wearing authority in charge to deliver voltages that would have gravely injured or killed a person if actually administered as the confederate shouted in fake agony, pounding on the walls in fake distress from the next room. 

Milgram’s experiments did not have to be stopped, since no one was shocked, but the results are deeply disturbing. We learn that people are obedient to authority to an extent that seems to entail an altered state of consciousness such as a hypnotic trance, perhaps like the concertation camp guards and other perpetrators of suicide bombings or war crimes. Though not quoted by Black for a Day, Lord Acton comes to mind: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, much precedent exists for social psychology experiments that fail spectacularly, and yet disclose disturbing results in spite of their limitations about people’s aggression, sheep-like obedience, out-and-out thoughtlessness, seeming incapacity for critical thinking – and racial prejudices; likewise with Gaines’ work?

Gaines does not make such a connection with social psychology, nor does she necessarily need to do so. A number of responses from black people suggested to Graham that he could never know the black person’s struggle without literally getting inside the skin of a black person. But that was his commitment – so that is what he tried to do. Remember, Graham person rescued Jewish children from the Nazis by pretending they were mentally ill and sending them abroad – a righteous use of deception if I have ever heard of one. Still, it turns out that changing one’s exterior color and working for a few weeks on changing the interior conversation makes great headlines, but does not work in establishing empathic relatedness. How could it?

Empathy is based on being authentic about who one is in relating to another person. Empathy is based on integrity and being straight with the other person to and with whom one is trying to relate. So the idea of starting off by pretending to be someone who one is not – impersonating a person one is not – is not going to produce empathy. One cannot start out by being a fake and expect to produce an authentic relationship. Hence, the idea of an empathic impersonation is a contradiction in terms. 

Staring with the integrity outage of impersonation does not create integrity – or empathy. It does not make a difference if one adds “race” to the mix. Empathic racial impersonation still results in fake relatedness and fake empathy. Now one may still learn a lot by going “under cover” and seeing how other people behave when they think you belong to the “in group” (in this case the “in group” of Southern segregationists or Northern racists), but one is going to get a complex, morally ambiguous integrity outage rather than an authentic relationship. 

In short, the muck-raking, memoires and experiments, of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell are social psychology experiment that go “off the rails.” The same can be said of the consistently devaluing assessment of these works in Black for a Day. These experiments, including Gaines’, provide engaging adventures and misadventures the demonstrate that when one starts out by faking solidarity, integrity, relatedness, and empathy as input, then one gets fake solidarity, fake integrity, fake relatedness, and fake empathy. This is not surprising. Fake in; fake out. The author calls this “empathic racial impersonation.” 

Along the same lines, one might rewrite Black for a Day to leverage Frantz Fanon, whose thought does get referenced but not really developed, to invalidate Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, etc., along the following lines: Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks notes a certain blind spot – one might say false consciousness – in survivors of colonialism, black people who pretend or fake white mannerisms, customs, styles, etc., for so many reasons, including in order to survive in a hostile, racist community. Now we have white people (Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, etc.) pretending (faking) being black. So, by the transitive property of logic, these white people are pretending to be black pretending to be white – that is, they are white, pretending to be white. Of course, this is a reduction to absurdity, and an over-simplification, but it might have shortened Gaines’ book and argument. Still, it devalues the possibility and application of empathy to promote racial understanding. 

So does Black for a Day. Gaines (2017: 8, 171) claims to get her definition of empathy from Leslie Jamison and bell hooks. First, following up on bell hooks’ Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), there is much about the relation to the Other and Otherness that resonates with my own interests. Speaking in the first person for emphasis, I get my humanness from the Other. In a strategic reversal, the infant humanizes / creates empathy in the parent; the student humanizes / creates empathy in the teacher; the patient, in the doctor; the customer, in the business person. The infant, in her lack of socialization, calls forth empathy in the parent to relate socially. The problem is that in bell hooks the Other relates to the one (and vice versa) in colonization, domination, subordination, imperialization, exploitation, manipulation. Nor do I dispute that these ways of relating are all-too-common. One reader finds a critique of empathy in bell hooks, whereas I find a critique of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, which indeed deserves debunking. Her (bell hooks’) book uses the word “empathy” four times in the standard way without defining it. Arguably hooks’ essay “Eating the Other” (1992) is an implied definition of empathy – though a diligent search does not turn up the word “empathy” in the essay. 

The challenge is that empathy is not “eating the other,” either literally or metaphorically. If anyone wishes to cite hooks’ magisterial authority, then the alternative point of view is that “eating the other” is the breakdown of empathy into merger, not the respectful distinction that maintains the integrity of the self and Other in the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy. If one starts by eating the Other (in any sense), one does not get to empathy. Eating the Other is a mutilation of the Other and a mutilation of empathy. If one arrives at eating the Other (in any sense), one has not gotten there via empathy. One gets empathy mutilated by emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and so on. One gets various fragments of humanness and human beings that are the breakdown products of empathy under capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, oral aggression, and so on. However, above all else – one gets indigestion.

Second, Leslie Jamison’s “Empathy Exams” (2014) is credited with the strategic ambiguity between the gift of empathy and invasion of the Other (though I would argue that falls short of a proper definition). Here are the facts. Ms Jamison is a struggling writer, and she gets a job as a medical actor. She is given a script in which she plays the role – pretends to be – impersonates – someone who has a major mental illness. This is part of medical training and the medical students know the medical actor is not a real patient. The medical student must question the “patient” and interact with the “patient” to establish the best diagnosis of the disorder. Speaking personally, I teach a class at Ross University Medical School that uses films with medical actors doing just that – and the students are challenged to get the best diagnosis. As far as I know, Jamison is not in any of the films. Furthermore, the “patient” then provides feedback to the student and the medical authorities on how empathic the MD-in-training was in questioning and relating to the “patient.” That is the empathy exam. 

This must be emphasized – and empathized – the integrity of the situation is intact – no one is pretending to be really ill when they are not, or black when they are white, and so on, and people understand the exercise as training; thus, Jamison’s penetrating and engaging and amusing account of her misadventures as a medical actor. In any case, the medical actor does not pretend to be mentally ill the way the Sprigle, etc. pretended to be black. The medical actor and the student MDs know the actors are acting. All the world is a stage, but the audience does not jump up on it to try and rescue the innocent orphan from the villain.

The experiments of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, etc. provide strong evidence, and I believe Gaines would agree, that when one attempts to take a walk in the other person’s shoes, it is harder to take off one’s own shoes than it might at first seem. Sprigle and company are trying to put the Other’s shoes on, but they cannot quite get their own off. They struggle mightily and I give them more credit for the effort than Gaines.

Staring with the integrity outage of impersonation does not create integrity – or empathy. I hasten to add it may expose the hypocrisies of Southern segregationists who claims that black people are happy with their subordinate roles (yet another white fantasy); or it may expose the unconscious biases (not explicitly invoked but ever present) of Northerners or the microaggressions of white liberals (and many others), who after all still struggle with racial stereotypes and the “white fantasies” of the subtitle of the stereotypes of the hyper-sexed black male or promiscuous black females. However, that is the thing about fantasies. There is nothing that prevents black people from having them too, though based on different experiences and in a different register than their white neighbors. The really tough question is whether Black for a Day believes that the possibility of racial cooperation and/or harmony – whether as an exemplary cooperative rainbow coalition or peaceful coexistence – is itself a mere fantasy – and so unlikely of realization. The steady drum beat in Black for a Day which calls out “empathic racial impersonation” sixty-five times in some 171 pages provides evidence that this is the main fantasy being debunked. 

Back covers of books are famously misleading, but after reading Black for a Day line-by-line, cover-to-cover, I believe the cover accurately represents the author’s position. I am not aware that anyone, black or white, has ever said – as does the back cover of Black for a Day – that “empathy is all that white Americans need” (my italics) to racially navigate social relations.  With the exception of the second to last paragraph of Black for a Day, the reader does not find a single statement in this book that is positive about the practice of empathy. None. One does not find a single example in the text of a rigorous and critical empathy that works to produce healthy empathic relatedness. If empathy is not “all” that is needed, what then is needed? Someone may usefully ask – because the author has not done so: what then is needed? 

The list of what is need is long, but it starts with a small set of related skills such as critical thinking, showing respect, acknowledgement, dignity, rigorous examination of one’s own implicit biases, and, of course, the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy. A case can also be made for reparations for survivors of slavery, such as a college education, but to get there is a whole issue in itself, and that cannot be pursued here. Okay, be charitable and attribute the “all” to the marketing department. However, once again, whatever the source, this “all” – as in “all you need is empathy” – is a nice example of an uncharitable argument, setting up a strawman – not in the sense of the Good Samaritan – but in the sense of engaging with the weakest, distorted, watered-down version of an argument, not the strongest. As noted, positively expressed, the scholarly standard is to try to make the opponent’s argument work. 

On background, the point is to be cooperative – “charitable” in Donald Davidson sense (1973: 136–137) – try to make the opponent’s argument work. Though it does not come up even to be summarily dismissed in Black for a Day, a case could be made that the journalist and social scientific experiments made a significant contribution to expanding the consciousness of the struggle against Jim Crow laws, the struggle for civil rights, and social justice, between 1947 and the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. (The “opponent” in this case is the journalist or social psychology experimenter, not  the racist, whose argument has been examined and is invalid and full of defects. If Black for a Day tries to make the argument in favor of empathy work, it does not try very hard.)

How shall I put it delicately? Empathy doesn’t work on or with those suffering from psychopathic personality disorder, delusional disorders, certain forms of childhood autism, or lynch mobs. IF you encounter any of these, especially the latter, dial 911 and call for backup such as the FBI and the FBI hostage negotiation team, who do actually practice a kind of Red Team empathy to take a walk in the shoes of one’s opponents (such as the racist sheriff or white supremacist, survivalist hostage taker). 

In contrast, the practice of empathy in the class room, therapy, coaching, clinical practice, and medical training (see Jamison above on the “Empathy Exams”), requires the creation of a safe space in in which people can be self-expressed, open about who they are authentically, and emotionally vulnerable without being bullied or subject to microaggressions. Indeed that is the one-minute empathy training – drive out bullying, aggression, prejudice (there are so many kinds!), cynicism, resignation, judgment, evaluation, politics in the negative sense, then empathy naturally and spontaneously comes forth. People want to be empathic, if given half a chance.  

In all of these difficult situations of dealing with difficult and even hostile people, the empathic practice consists in setting boundaries, establishing limits, and all necessary measures of self-defense. There is the practice of a kind of radical empathy in nonviolent civil disobedience as taught by Gandhi and King, which powerfully appeals to the conscience of the racist sheriff by accepting the punishment of the fine or two weeks in jail. Note that implies there is a community, however broken, because the racist sheriff is credited with having enough conscience to think “something is wrong with a system that punishes someone for trying to come in through the front door and sit in for lunch at the local diner” Nor is this relevant only in 1947 for in Q2 2023 the Alabama State legislation had its gerrymander voting districts declared invalid by the Supreme Court again in Q2 2023. As noted, it is not only microaggressions that are so troubling.

Hindsight is 20-20 and Gaines’ work is rich in it – the last lynching was supposedly in 1981 (see Wikipedia article cited below), but the cop’s knee on George Floyd’s neck occurred in 2020. In July 2022, Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 21 years in prison (where Chauvin is today) for violating Floyd’s civil rights. An example of an uncharitable argument would be to charge the author with not acknowledging this ongoing macroaggression – more problematic is that one can and should oppose both microaggression and such macroaggressions as the risks of wide spread disenfranchisement of minorities, militarized police behavior that does not protect minority communities while profiling them for super-surveillance, and the effective banning of teaching African American history in HS’s in Florida where, coincidently, the author teaches college. It is easy to be cynical and resigned and propose “empathic racial impersonation” as another sixty-five bricks in the cynical wall of interracial relations. The hard work consists in driving out cynicism and resignation and allowing empathy to expand in the individual and community.

And while we are elaborating fantasies, all the times that empathic connections were being attacked, invalidated, faked, and impersonated, I am deeply ashamed to acknowledge that I had the fantasy that empathy was being lynched, lynched as retributive justice for not making a difference during all those body and soul murdering lynchings that occurred and are still occurring during encounters with unprofessional police. If you encounter any of these, then take action to set boundaries, reestablish limits, and recover safety and security. However, the misfiring and breakdown of empathy into fake empathy does not invalid empathy as such or its ability to make a profound difference in conflict resolution when deployed by a skillful partitioner. As I like to note, empathy should never be under-estimated, but, once again, empathy does not work with psychopaths, certain kinds of autism, most bullies, and lynch mobs. I am skeptical after Gandhi, King, and Malcolm, to add race relations to the list, notwithstanding that Black for a Day has tried to make a case for doing so. 

Black for a Day may object that the critique of empathy only applies to the limited and unconsciously biased practices of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, and so on. However, Black for a Day has at least one significant blind spot of its own. In 171 pages of adventures and misadventures there are sixty-fives uses of “empathic racial impersonation,” which I determined in a line-by-line reading as the distinction is not in the index. In every case without exception as the impersonator tries to reach an understanding between the races, the interaction fails, misfires, and devolves into false consciousness of “empathic racial impersonation.” No good comes of it. White people can’t be anything but white (see above). There is not a single instance of a successful practice of empathy or clearly attained understanding between two individuals of different colors resulting in authentic empathic relatedness. Not one in 171 pages. Except for the second to last paragraph of the book, the practice of empathy is dismissed and devalued. In this one instance of a near miss of interracial empathy, with Carmen and Rose, mother and daughter (white pretending to be black), they are ever-so-close to reaching an expanded appreciation of the struggles of black people, but their experiences are invalidated. Gaines writes: “Both Rose and Carmen come away from this project with a profound sense of alienation. They feel a wall – one built by history, suspicion, paranoia, stereotype, and assumptions they conclude are nearly impossible to either penetrate or scale” (2017: 155). 

This reviewer protests. I repeat with urgency: Why is it that in 171 pages of penetrating and incisive and dense description, there is not a single instance of successful empathy? Why is there not one example of what a healthy example of successful empathic relatedness would look like so that one could identify it if one happened to run across it? Possibly the author has never seen or experienced one, but I do not accept that as the author is a sensitive, intelligent, empathic human being. My hypothesis is that the author has a grievance about the microaggressions – the dignity violations – to which she was unempathically and disrespectfully subjected; and one must agree that there are many things exist about which to be aggrieved. This results in the possibility of a rigorous and critical empathy – authentic empathy – being lost in the mistranslation of “empathic racial impersonation.” “Racial impersonation,” yes – but fake empathy is not empathy. Fake empathy has little or nothing to do with empathy, which remains unclarified by this work or its subtitle.

At every turn – I counted them – sixty-five times, we get “empathic racial impersonation,” and the steady drum beat of invalidation. Empathy goes off the rails as projection, conformity, bad faith, conscious and unconscious bias, communications lost in translation. Indeed, empathy is a most imperfect practice, nor are these struggling and misguided impersonators given the benefit of the doubt. Black for a Day does not engage with the strongest version of the argument that empathy is valuable. Empathy is the weakest, watered-down, or distorted one – “eating the other” or being a fake medical actor. Hmmm. Positively expressed, the scholarly standard is to try to make the opponent’s argument work rather than engaging with a distorted, strawman version of it. The one possible exception is if an author wishes to write a polemical piece. For example, Nietzsche explicitly subtitles his Genealogy of Morals “A Polemic.” If that is the author’s intention here, it is nowhere expressed, for example, in the preface.

Absent engaging in polemics, the point is to be cooperative – “charitable” in Donald Davidson’s sense (1973: 136–137) – try to make the opponent’s argument work. Though a whole essay is be required to explain “charity” in this argumentative sense, a short version of a charitable position might argue that, through the efforts of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, ”reality” Black.White TV, and so on, were clumsy and ultimately flawed, the consciousnesses of poorly informed (and prejudiced) white people were expanded in being exposed to the injustices with which black people were struggling, and going forward black people can be counted on to take economic and legislative action on their own behalf. 

As Malcolm-X said to his black audience, “You didn’t’ land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on you.” The “opponent” in this case is the social psychology experimenter, who is seeking interracial understanding, not the racist or white supremacist, whose argument has been tested and is invalid, full of defects. Malcolm-X: The white man (person) has behaved like the very devil – indeed is the devil – and if the black person is waiting around for help from the white person, it is going to be a long wait. That is agency: Get to work, which arguably Gaines has done, attacking every empathic connection she could find. Nevertheless, Malcolm modified his view when he encountered white Europeans, Middle Easterners, and especially Islamic people of good will, who championed the causes of social justice and black economic progress in the US. 

Though the contributions of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell are flawed – deeply flawed – in the time of Jim Crow, before the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964/65, these pioneers contributed to rousing the conscience of the nation against the injustices of segregation in the south and alternative forms of discrimination in the north. What they did not do is invent or promote Black Power – black agency – in calling forth economic, political, and legislative action to improve black lives. What they did not do is address the problem of microaggressions, dignity violation and insults that cumulatively add up to significant narcissistic injury. Such insults, subtle meanness, and narcissistic slights have existed from time immemorial, but the distinction “microaggression” as such was first articulated in 1970 Harvard University psychiatrist Chester Piece (according to D. W. Sue 2010). 

An example from Black for a Day? The author’s seventh grade history teacher – tin-eared, hypocritical, racist, or just having had the class read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, or all of the above – asks the young Gaines to explain to her classmates what slavey was really like (2017: 2) – as if Alisha had been a slave?! Such a dignity violation is exemplary of what sounded like – but I am guessing – a difficult if not hostile and unempathic environment (and that is matter for the author’s memoire, not this text). It is no wonder that the author is aggrieved. Even enraged. But why against empathy? 

One may argue back: No, no, Lou, you just don’t get it – the grievance is against “empathic racial impersonation.” Okay fine. I assert that I got that. Here is the problem with that: when one starts out with impersonation to deceive the Other, then one is going to be prevented from relating to that Other authentically as is required by and with empathy. “Empathic impersonation” is fake empathy. So, coming from impersonation, the attempt to practice empathy based on an integrity outage is not going to work. 

Never under-estimate the power of empathy, yet empathy is not going to work coming from an integrity outage. Now impersonation might produce credible undercover journalism; it might produce legally admissible undercover police work; it might produce engaging war games at the Pentagon where the Red Team takes a walk in the Blue Team’s opponent’s shoes to sink their ships in an imaginary Persian Gulf scenario; it might even produce an engaging social psychology experiment in which “confederates” of the experimenter pretend to be who they are not to disclose unconscious bias. However, what such impersonation is not going to produce is empathy. “Empathic impersonation,” as noted, is a contradiction, and blows itself up. It is not going to produce authentic person-to-person understanding of who the other person is as a possibility of relating with openness and integrity. One does not get to integrity and openness by being closed off and deceptive. Well and good. Gaines and I are in agreement about the problematic nature of impersonation; where I take strong exception to Black for a Day, is the claim that this is a valid critique of empathy. 

I comment on Black for a Day as the author of three peer-reviewed books on empathy (2010, 2014, 2015). I grew up in Chicago, so the Jesuits who taught me world history and US history included liberation theology and significant elements of what was then called “Black History,” but I am no authority on either of the latter. However, regarding empathy, I have done my homework, though in a deep sense I am no more or less empathic than any parent with children, doctor with patients, business person with customers, or teacher with students. Empathy is a high bar. On a good day, I get there; on other days, I struggle like everyone else.

What my empathy suggests to me is that the author is aggrieved about something – maybe a lot of things – possibly microaggressions – and I am inclined to say, “It sounds like you could use some empathy – please count on mine!” However, based on the text, she is not asking for it – empathy – does not see value in it – and seems to find satisfaction in attacking every possibility of empathic connection that comes forth. When it comes to empathy, Gaines does not “get it” – in just about every sense. Gaines fails a readiness assessment for the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy – does not commit to or try to create a safe space in which a debate or empathic listening could occur. One could argue back – one is human, therefore, ready or not, here comes empathy; and one is ready for empathy whether one likes it or not, and the point must be acknowledged – there is an unwillingness to engage with the strongest version of a rigorous and critical empathy rather than a watered-down weird “eat the other.” In short, the rumor of empathy remains a rumor in the case of Black for a Day; the rumor is not confirmed; and empathy does not live in this work. It is where empathy goes to become fake empathy. Don’t go there.

References 

Authors of Wikipedia. The lynching of Michael Donald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Michael_Donald [checked on 2023-09-24]

Donald Davidson. (1973). Radical interpretation. In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2001: 125–139.

Milgram, Stanley (1963). “Behavioral Study of Obedience”. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 67 (4): 371–8.

Gunnar Myrdal. (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 Vols, 2^ndEdition (1965). New York: Harper and Row”

https://archive.org/stream/AmericanDilemmaTheNegroProblemAndModernDemocracy/AmericanDelemmaVersion2_djvu.txt[checked on 2023-0925]

D. Wing Sue. (2010). Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. New York: Wiley.

Elisabeth Young-Breuhl. (1996). The Anatomy of Prejudices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Philip Zimbardo. (2008). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House.

(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project