Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading

How white engagement with African American cultural texts can lead to empathy between races Critics often characterize white consumption of African American culture as a form of theft that echoes the fantasies of 1950s-era bohemians, or "White Negroes," who romanticized black culture as anarchic and sexually potent. In Beyond the White Negro, Kimberly Chabot Davis claims such a view fails to describe the varied politics of racial crossover in the past fifteen years. Drawing on her background in the study of cross-racial empathy, Kimberly Chabot Davis analyzes how white engagement with African American novels, film narratives, and hip-hop can help encourage anti-racist attitudes that may catalyze social change and racial justice. Though acknowledging the oft-bemoaned failure to establish cross-racial empathy, Davis's study of ethnographic data from book clubs and college classrooms shows how a combination of engagement with African American culture and informal or formal pedagogical support can lead to the kinds of white self-examination that make empathy possible. The result is a groundbreaking text that challenges the trend of focusing on society's failures in achieving cross-racial empathy and instead explores possible avenues for change.