The project’s epilogue then turns to the cultural nerve struck by the viral media story of Rachel Dolezal, a former NAACP chapter president who was “outed” for claiming she was black. Its genealogy includes: the magical racial change of a white Senator in the 1947 musical, Finian’s Rainbow journalist Ray Sprigle’s four weeks as a black man in the South in 1948 journalist and memoirist, John Howard Griffin’s, five weeks as a black man in 1959 Grace Halsell’s stunt as a black woman in Harlem and Mississippi for six months in 1969 and the families of the Sparks and the Wurgels switching races for reality television in 2006. Black for a Day constructs a genealogy of white liberals who temporarily “become” black under the alibi of racial empathy. The project rethinks the political consequences of empathy by examining mid-to-late twentieth and twenty-first century narratives of racial impersonation enabled by the spurious alibi of racial reconciliation. Her first manuscript, Black for a Day: Fantasies of Race and Empathy, was published with UNC Press (Spring 2017).

In 2014, FSU’s Spiritual Life Project honored her with a Transformation Through Teaching Award, and she won a university-wide Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2017. Gaines was named a 2014-2015 McKnight Junior Faculty Development Fellow. Woodson postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia. Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of English,įlorida State Gaines is the Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of English with a PhD in English and a certificate in African and African American Studies from Duke University.

The case against empathy