The Limits of Empathy
Link to podcast on NPR.org (36 minutes)
“There’s a long tradition of white people trying to understand what it would be like to step into Black people’s shoes. But the journalist Grace Halsell went one step further: She attempted to step into Black people’s skin.
Using vitiligo treatment pills to help darken her complexion, Halsell traveled and worked in Harlem and Mississippi in 1968, passing as a black woman. She documented her experiences in her 1969 book Soul Sister, which she said she hoped would help white people to understand what it was like to be Black. (She was inspired by John Howard Griffin, whose 1961 book Black Like Me took a similar approach.)
This episode is a collaboration with the Radio Diaries podcast, in which we hear archival footage of Halsell herself talking about the conversations she had hoped to spark. We also spoke to two professors—Alisha Gaines and Robin D. G. Kelley—who have spent a lot of time thinking about Halsell’s experiment. Gaines is an English professor at Florida State University and author of Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy. Kelley is an American history professor at UCLA and author of a forthcoming biography of Halsell.
Gaines and Kelley talked to us about Grace Halsell, the ideas she came to about Blackness, and why empathy alone is an incomplete tool for achieving racial justice.”
