Covered

This has the whiff a bad idea from the start. Canadian author Sam Forster decided that he'd "go undercover" as it were, and using dark makeup and a wig, traveled some parts of the United States to get a look for himself of the experience of being a Black person. If the online responses to the announcement of his book about the project, Seven Shoulders: Taxonomizing Racism in Modern America, are anything to go by, the Black American community was not amused.

Mainly because they were too busy being offended by a action that, while probably ill-advised, doesn't appear to have been intended to be malicious in any way.

I understand the assertion that if Mr. Forster wanted to write a book about race relation in the United States, he could have spoken to some number of Black people and simply told their stories. But I don't understand that to have been the entire goal. He wanted to understand for himself, first hand, what being Black in America is like. But the problem with that is the unspoken presumption that there's a something that it's like to be Black in America, rather than a few million individual somethings. But that's an error that a lot of people make... after all, it's not like "Whiteness" is understood to be experienced differently by every individual, because it's simply a thing that's out there.

But, and I may alone in this, I applaud him for giving a shot. Whether he went about it in the right way or not, he wanted to understand enough that he took it upon himself to do something that took a great deal of time and effort, and may have even jeopardized his career. That's very much more than can be said for a lot of people. Then again, Mr. Forster is Canadian, so that may have something to do with in. I've long suspected that the way we talk about, and deal with, race in the United States is an active impediment to the progress that people say they want.

Whether his book will do as he hopes, and break through to some people who don't find the writing of Black journalists and academics compelling, I don't know. I doubt that it will. After all, people who actively have something against Black people tend to also dislike White people they perceive as siding with them. But at least he managed to gain some attention for yet another book about race in America.

I'd like to learn more about the book, but the news coverage is more or less exclusively about the negative reaction of "Black Twitter" to the whole project. Outrage for the outrage cycle. I don't know if I'm going to take the time to read it for myself, given that I already understand what it's like to be me in the modern United States. But I suspect it might be a worthwhile takealong the next time I need to travel somewhere; or maybe an audio version would be a good way to spend some time.

In any event, I do think that it would be a good thing for the book to find an audience, if for no other reason than it's going to be a different perspective on something that I think any number of people believe that they already know everything there is to know about.