The curious history of racial impersonation

By Alisha Gaines, Florida State University Since the mid-20th century, a handful of white journalists have tried to understand the complexity of the Black experience through donning a costume. Reg Burkett/Express/Hulton Archive via Getty Images A peculiar desire seems to still haunt some white people: “I wish I knew what it was like to be Black.” This wish is different from wanting to cosplay the coolness of Blackness – mimicking style, aping music and parroting vernacular. This is a presumptive, racially imaginative desire, one that covets not just the rhythm of Black life, but also its blues. While he doesn’t want to admit it, Canadian-American journalist Sam Forster is one of those white people. Three years after hearing George Floyd cry “Mama” so desperately that it brought a country out of quarantine, Forster donned a synthetic Afro wig and brown contacts, tinted his eyebrows and smeared his face with CVS-bought Maybelline liquid foundation in the shade of “Mocha.” Though Forster did not achieve a “movie-grade” transformation, he became, in his words, “Believably Black.” He went on to attempt a racial experiment no one asked for, one that he wrote about in his recently published memoir, “Seven Shoulders: Taxonomizing Racism in...