Black scholars criticize white writer's 'dehumanizing' use of blackface to write book on U.S. race relations

A Canadian journalist is defending his decision to travel the U.S. in blackface and write a book about racism, after facing a storm of criticism online.

"Last summer, I disguised myself as a Black man and traveled throughout the United States to document how racism persists in American society," Sam Forster, who is white, posted Tuesday on X, formerly Twitter. "Writing Seven Shoulders was one of the hardest things I've ever done as a journalist."

The reaction was swift and brutal, with X users expressing anger, amusement and confusion, and telling Forster he should have simply spoken to Black people to understand their experiences.

"It's hard to simultaneously draw the ire of black people, white people, conservatives, AND liberals… But I think you've just done it," rapper and podcaster Zuby replied on X.

Several Black scholars who study race relations and write about the Black experience told CBC News that Forster's use of blackface is dehumanizing and troublesome, regardless of the context. Forster himself defended the book and the methods he used to write it in an interview with CBC News.

George Dei, director of the Centre for Integrated Anti-Racism Studies and a social justice professor at the University of Toronto, told CBC that Seven Shoulders feeds into questions around who has the authority to speak about the Black experience.

"There are Black scholars who write on these issues, and they have said all that needs to be said. So why do we need a white person to do that?" he said.

"We also need to question why we live in a society where people have to pretend who they are not in order to understand something."

Forster grew up in Edmonton and attended both the University of Alberta and the University of Toronto. He now lives in Montreal, and has written for various publications including The National Post. 

He describes the self-published book as an homage to John Howard Griffin's 1961 book Black Like Me, and others who did "journalistic blackface" in the 1940s and 50s.

In Black Like Me, Griffin recounts the six weeks he spent travelling through the southern U.S. after darkening his skin to better understand what life was like for Black Americans under segregation.

In Seven Shoulders, Forster writes that his book offers a unique perspective on race in the modern era, because "for a short window, I became Black. I experienced the world as a Black man."

He goes on to write, "Nobody has an experiential barometer with respect to race, for that matter … nobody except for me," concluding, "My barometer is better than anyone else's."