Episode 21 | White Fantasies of Race and Empathy

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined by scholar and author Alisha Gaines,

Author of Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy (UNC Press, 2017), which Jonathan Holloway describes as “nuanced examination of the many complicated layers that inform the ‘Black experience.” Gaines, who is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University, returned to Duke University, where she earned a Ph.D. in 2009, as part of the Symposium,  Black Women, Black Studies and Knowledge Production. In her book Professor 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.