Flipping John Howard Griffin's classic Black Like Me, and extending Noel Ignatiev's How The Irish Became White into the present-day, Wise explores the meanings and consequences of whiteness, and discusses the ways in which racial privilege can harm not just people of color, but also whites. Using stories instead of stale statistics, Wise weaves a narrative that is at once readable and yet scholarly; analytical and yet accessible.
This American classic has been corrected from the original manuscripts and indexed, featuring historic photographs and an extensive biographical afterword.
First published by Orbis Books in 1997,Man in the Mirrortells the story behindBlack Like Me, a book that astonished America upon its publication in 1961, and remains an American classic 50 years later. In 1959 a white writer darkened his skin and passed for a time as a "Negro" in the Deep South. John Howard Griffin was that writer, and his bookBlack Like Meswiftly became a national sensation. Few readers know of the extraordinary journey that led to Griffin's risky "experiment"—the culmination of a lifetime of risk, struggle, and achievement. A native of Texas, Griffin was a medical student who became involved in the rescue of Jews in occupied France; a U.S. serviceman among tribal peoples in the South Pacific, where he suffered an injury that left him blinded for a decade; a convert to Catholicism; and, finally, a novelist and writer. All these experiences fed Griffin's drive to understand what it means to be human, and how human beings can justify treating their fellows—of whatever race or physical description—as "the intrinsic Other." After describing this journey and analyzing the text ofBlack Like Me, Robert Bonazzi treats the dramatic aftermath of Griffin's experiment and life.Man in the Mirrorprovides a fascinating look at the roots of this important book, and offers reflections on why, after all these years, it retains its impact and relevance.
In 1948, journalist Ray Sprigle traded his whiteness to live as a black man for four weeks. A little over a decade later, John Howard Griffin famously "became" black as well, traveling the American South in search of a certain kind of racial understanding. Contemporary history is littered with the surprisingly complex stories of white people passing as black, and here Alisha Gaines constructs a unique genealogy of "empathetic racial impersonation--white liberals walking in the fantasy of black skin under the alibi of cross-racial empathy. At the end of their experiments in "blackness," Gaines argues, these debatably well-meaning white impersonators arrived at little more than false consciousness. Complicating the histories of black-to-white passing and blackface minstrelsy, Gaines uses an interdisciplinary approach rooted in literary studies, race theory, and cultural studies to reveal these sometimes maddening, and often absurd, experiments of racial impersonation. By examining this history of modern racial impersonation, 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.
A widely praised young writer delivers a daring, ambitious novel about identity and race in the age of globalization. One afternoon, not long after Kelly Thorndike has moved back to his hometown of Baltimore, an African American man he doesn't recognize calls out to him. To Kelly’s shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, who was one of Kelly’s closest friends in high school—and, before his disappearance nearly twenty years before, white and Jewish. Martin then tells an astonishing story: after years of immersing himself in black culture, he’s had a plastic surgeon perform “racial reassignment surgery”: altering his hair, skin, and physiognomy to allow him to pass as African American. Unknown to his family or childhood friends, Martin has been living a new life ever since. Now, however, Martin feels he can no longer keep his identity a secret; he wants Kelly to help him ignite a controversy that will help sell racial reassignment surgery to the world. Inventive and thought-provoking, Your Face in Mine is a brilliant novel about cultural and racial alienation and the nature of belonging in a world where identity can be a stigma or a lucrative brand.
No less a critic than Clifton Fadiman called "The Devil Rides Outside" a staggering novel. The first novel of John H. Griffin, it written during the authorOCOs decade of blindness following an injury suffered during the closing days of World War II. As "Time Magazine" described it, "The Devil Rides Outside" has some things relatively rare in U.S. letters: energy, earnestness and unashamed religious fervor. Written as a diary, the novel relates the intellectual and spiritual battles of a young American musicologist who is studying Gregorian chant in a French Benedictine monastery. Even though he is not Catholic, he must live like the monks, sleeping in a cold stone cell, eating poor food, sharing latrine duties. His dreams rage with memories of his Paris mistress; his days are spent being encouraged by the monks to seek God. He takes up residence outside the monastery after an illness, but he finds the village a slough of greed and pettiness and temptation. Indeed, as the French proverb says, the devil rides outside the monastery walls."
Blackness is a prized commodity in American pop culture. Marketed to white consumers, it invites whites to view themselves in a mirror of racial difference, while remaining “wholly” white. From sports to literature, film, and music to investigative journalism, Eric Lott reveals the hidden dynamics of this self-and-other racial mirroring.
White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing is the story of Gail Lukasik’s mother’s “passing,” Gail’s struggle with the shame of her mother’s choice, and her subsequent journey of self-discovery and redemption. In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother’s decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother’s fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother’s racial lineage, tracing her family back to eighteenth-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage. With a foreword written by Kenyatta Berry, host of PBS's Genealogy Roadshow, this unique and fascinating story of coming to terms with oneself breaks down barriers.
