Black for a Day

White Fantasies of Race and Empathy

Alisha Gaines

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781469632834, 9781469632827
• eBook ISBN: 9781469632841
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

CHAPTER ONE

Good Niggerhood

Ray Sprigle’s Dixie Terror

A decade after winning the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the links between Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and the Ku Klux Klan, Ray Sprigle, a nationally renowned journalist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, pitched a new story to his editor. He was confident that the idea would place him back in contention for that coveted prize. Unlike previous assignments—going undercover as a butcher to expose the black market in meat, or posing as an attendant to investigate Pennsylvania’s mental health institutions—this time Sprigle wanted to impersonate not just another person but also another race. For what would be his last undercover story, Sprigle wanted to become a black man. However, he was no bleeding heart liberal: “I might as well be honest about this expedition of mine,” he later wrote. “I wasn’t bent upon any crusade. All I saw at first was the possibility of a darned good newspaper story.”1 Regardless of his motivations, for four “endless, crawling weeks” in May 1948, Sprigle “ate, slept, traveled, [and] lived Black.”2

On August 9, 1948, the Post-Gazette began publishing a twenty-one–part series of highly anticipated front-page articles, what the paper numbered as “chapters,” entitled “I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days.” The first column, situated above the fold of the paper, accompanied a large picture of a slouching Sprigle, presumably but not immediately recognizable as a black man, in what looks like a field. The following prefaces his column: “All of the incidents described are factual, but Mr. Sprigle has in some cases changed the names of persons and places for the protection of the individuals involved.”3 In each installment, Sprigle detailed his hopefully prize-winning journalistic experiment. The series—expanded into the book-length memoir In the Land of Jim Crow in 1949—is comprised primarily of short portraits of southern black life, from sharecropper’s cabins and dilapidated elementary schools to churches and juke joints. Written from the perspective of a northern white man’s encounter with the “iniquitous Jim Crow system,”4 Sprigle’s experiment indexes postwar anxieties about the place and value of black bodies in a nation still reeling from the horrifying consequences of biological racism in Europe. As the United States sought to solidify itself as an emerging world superpower, there was growing pressure to attend to the hypocrisy of American racism. As Sprigle crosses both the color line and the Mason-Dixon line, he betrays the wishful idea that the U.S. brand of racial terror was a peculiarly southern institution. Ultimately, Sprigle’s investigation rests completely on a convenient idea of the South—one defined by Jim Crow segregation and fueled by an inversion of southern nostalgia and the myth of northern innocence. This chapter will establish and define three primary theoretical components of empathetic racial impersonation: “Dixie terror,” the failed white ally, and the Myrdalian scaffolding of this genealogy. It will also critique the limits of Sprigle’s empathy resulting from his class-constrained, fear-based persona of a “good nigger.”

Dixie Terror and the Geographies of Blackness

Martin Raymond Sprigle was born white on August 14, 1886, in Akron, Ohio, to Emmanuel Peter Sprigle and Sarah Ann Hoover. After growing up in northeast Ohio, Sprigle briefly attended Ohio State University before embarking on a career in journalism in 1906. He wrote for a number of southern and midwestern newspapers, and by 1911 he had established a thriving journalistic career in the steel town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Sprigle quickly rose through the ranks of the paper to city editor but was fired because of his overt affiliation with the International Workers of the World, a radical labor union. Unemployed, Sprigle enlisted in the army and edited a military newspaper in Virginia during World War I. In 1918, Sprigle returned to the Post-Gazette as an investigative crime reporter, and later he was reappointed to city editor. Sprigle made a name for himself primarily through his undercover journalism. Because of his style of mixing facts with unfiltered opinion, Sprigle was described as a “shrewd,” “hard-digging, hell-for-leather newsman,” and a “muckraker.”5 By the time Sprigle decided to be reborn as black, he had a national reputation as Pittsburgh’s most famous reporter and “ranked among the country’s elite” journalists.6

After receiving permission from the newspaper’s co-publisher and editor, William Block and Andrew Bernhard, respectively, Sprigle began the process of becoming his black alter ego, James Rayel Crawford. The name was easy and familiar; he had used it during previous undercover assignments.7 However, looking black was far more difficult than he anticipated, and the search for a suitable method of embodiment took nearly six months. Sprigle complains, “This thing of suddenly switching races after more than half a century of life as a white man has its problems and difficulties.” He continues, “Remember all those romances you’ve read in which the hero is going to turn Hindu, or Arab or one of the other darker races. Remember how almost invariably he goes to ‘an old woman’ … and she gives him a lotion that turns him dark for weeks or months. Well, my trouble, I guess, was that I couldn’t seem to find one of those old women. And in more than six months of searching I couldn’t find any lotion or liquid that would turn a white hide brown or black and still be impervious to perspiration, soap and water and the ravages of ordinary wear and tear.”8 Without a magical old woman, Sprigle consulted chemists at the Mellon Institute of Applied Science. They recommended phenol compounds that would indeed change his skin. However, they warned, the chemicals would kill him in the process. Undiscouraged, Sprigle decided on his own less fatal transformation: he attempted to darken his skin with the juice of walnut hulls, along with “iodine, argyrol, pyrogallic acid, [and] potassium permanganate.” Unfortunately, “come a little perspiration and I’d find myself striped like a tiger or spotted like a leopard.”9 Finally, he settled for an easier alternative—a tan. After three weeks sunbathing in Florida, Sprigle became a self-described “reasonable facsimile of a light-skinned Negro from the North.”10

Although Sprigle worried about his ability to look black enough, he quickly realized that “most of my concern over acquiring a dark skin was so much nonsense. Everywhere I went in the South I encountered scores of Negroes as white as I ever was back home in Pittsburgh.”11 Sprigle concluded that his blackness required not a physical alteration but, more important, a willingness to face the precarious vulnerability of “being” black in the Jim Crow South. He writes, “Southern whites have long taken the position that when a man says he’s black, so far as they are concerned he is.”12 Sprigle maintained his sun-made color, a shade he described as “coffee-with-plenty-of-cream,” and coupled it with Jim Crow segregation to produce a black identity.13

On an evening in May, Sprigle decided he was ready. He left Florida for Washington, D.C., to board a segregated railroad coach that would carry his suntanned body back south to Atlanta. Before boarding the train, Sprigle had to tone down his eccentric sartorial style. When not undercover, Sprigle sported a ten-gallon sombrero, silver-ringed cane, and corncob pipe. However, on that particular night in 1948, he swapped his signature hat for a droopy, checkered one, put on oversized, black-rimmed glasses, and traded his sharp black suit and tie for a drab, but still respectable, brown suit. He traveled light—with just one small brown bag. He had already shaved both his head and mustache. He was sixty-one.

Over the next four weeks, Sprigle was introduced to a different South, subsequently learning how blackness is not always immediately legible on the body, and that racial identity and belonging have as much to do with how one negotiates the legalities and geographies that produce difference and its consequences. He writes, “I quit being white, and free, and an American citizen when I climbed aboard that Jim Crow coach in Washington’s Union Station. From then on, until I came up out of the South four weeks later, I was black, and in bondage—not quite slavery but not quite freedom, either.”14 As he navigated the Jim Crow South by strategically relinquishing unfettered access to restrooms, water fountains, waiting rooms, and the more amorphous and intangible realms of convenience and privilege, Sprigle experienced how segregation structures black life, or what he called “ ‘passing,’ in reverse.”15

The name Sprigle gives to his racial experiment is useful. His phrasing, “passing, in reverse,” prompts us to consider how the longer history of passing—from black to white—impacts his narrative. Passing is legally defined by Randall Kennedy as “a deception that enables a person to adopt certain roles or identities from which he would be barred by prevailing social standards in the absence of his misleading conduct.”16 Although that “deception” can extend to a number of identity categories, its most common, trenchant, and revelatory manifestation in American history has been race. Colloquially referred to as “crossing the line,” racial passing is a contested negotiation of race troubling the categories of identity. Although we reify these categories with the belief in the supposedly clear boundaries of identity, racial passing is a reminder of how fluid and mercurial identity really is. Kennedy continues, “The classic racial passer in the United States has been the ‘white Negro’: the individual whose physical appearance allows him to present himself as ‘white’ but whose ‘black’ lineage (typically only a very partial black lineage) makes him a Negro according to dominant racial rules.”17 Complementing Kennedy’s definition, Allyson Hobbs, in A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, makes the compelling argument that “racial passing is an exile.” She writes, “To pass as white was to make an anxious decision to turn one’s back on a black racial identity and to claim to belong to a group to which one was not legally assigned.”18 She continues, “A study of passing uncovers a phenomenon that, by definition, was intended to be clandestine and hidden, to leave no trace.”19

Throughout the African American literary canon, black-to-white passing remains a persistent theme for black writers negotiating blackness, blood, racism, authenticity, economics, love, law, opportunity, segregation, and politics to various ends. The most exemplary passing narrative is Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, but racial passing finds expression in the work of authors as varied as Charles Chesnutt, Ellen and William Craft, Harriet Jacobs, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, and Langston Hughes.20 One can conclude that the African American literary canon has a preoccupation with passing, beginning in early novels like William Wells Brown’s 1853 Clotel: Or, the President’s Daughter, and Frances Harper’s sentimental and dogmatic 1892 novel Iola Leroy. Passing in African American literature is a persistent and consistent preoccupation present in even more contemporary memoirs, like those by Bliss Broyard and Toi Derricotte.21 Ultimately, passing offers a thematic way to read the entirety of the African American literary canon. Such a reading reveals a consistent negotiation of passing and its dangers, an anxiety about race and authenticity, and the haunting manifestation of the passer as an archetypal, tragic figure like Clare Kendry in Larsen’s Passing, as well as more recent attempts to disrupt and revise the archetypal tragedy of the racial passer, as in Danzy Senna’s 1998 novel Caucasia.

Whereas both Kennedy and Hobbs define crossing the line through histories of black-to-white passing, in Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception across the Color Line, Martha Sandweiss details the strange story of famed white geologist Clarence King, who for more than a decade passed for black as a Pullman porter and steelworker in order to common-law marry his wife, Ada Copeland, a black woman born into slavery. Sandweiss writes, “King’s secrecy speaks to his desire to preserve his reputation. But it speaks also to the very real constraints of public opinion” in the late nineteenth century.22 “The practice of passing,” Sandweiss makes clear, “generally involves adopting a particular identity to move toward greater legal and social privilege.”23 She continues, “Rather than moving toward legal and social privilege, he moved away from it. He glimpsed something he sought in Ada Copeland and her African American world, and he acted to seize the promise of that rich emotional life.”24 Although white King and his black persona, James Todd, might seem to be the historic precedent to Sprigle’s racial impersonation, King passed for love. Sprigle did not.

Sprigle is not passing as many black authors represent it, or as Kennedy, Hobbs, and Sandweiss define it. Although Sprigle’s temporary blackness is informed by, but then deviates from, the theatrical burnt cork of the blackface minstrel, he does not embody blackness for love, safety, convenience, or as a way to avoid discrimination and segregation. Instead, Sprigle embodies blackness to place himself in the harrowing way of Jim Crow. Since Sprigle aims to reveal something about discrimination and racial terror in the South, he spectacularly advertises the manner and method of his four-week black dalliance. In other words, Sprigle intends to lea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Good Niggerhood
• Chapter Two: The Missing Day
• Chapter Three: A Secondhand Kind of Terror
• Chapter Four: Empathy TV
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index