The following is an excerpt from Seven Shoulders: Taxonomizing Racism in Modern America, a chapter entitled “Becoming Black,” by Sam Forster, a Canadian journalist. Forster claims the book seeks to explore the state of modern American race relations, while critics accuse him of erasing true black experiences. The book will be released May 30 and is available on Amazon. The excerpt has been edited for brevity.
In order to pose as a Black hitchhiker, I first needed to figure out how to become Black … which is actually more challenging than one might expect. There isn’t a lot of useful advice out there. You can’t just Google it. If you search “Wikihow blackface”, for example, the top result is a WikiHow article titled “How to Tell if You Are a Racist: 13 Steps (with Pictures).”
I didn’t have time to read the article. I’m sure I would have been beyond salvage in the author’s mind… Whatever… A whole bunch of other articles also popped up, mostly with titles along the lines of “Why you should never do blackface,” and “Here’s why blackface is racist.”
Anyway, there isn’t a lot of guidance online, and asking a real human in real life was totally out of the question, for obvious reasons. Naturally, I considered how my predecessors went about their transformations.
Sprigle’s transformation was relatively basic. After experimenting with a range of lotions, liquids, and unguents, and after consulting with numerous chemists about the application of phenol compounds, all to no avail, Sprigle decided to try creating an infusion from mahogany bark. Convinced that this would be the winning solution, he ordered a hundred-pound bale of the material from Nicaragua. When the mahogany bark proved unsuccessful in producing the desired change in skin tone, he simply decided to burn himself in the sun. Three weeks of intensive tanning in Florida gave him a “passable coffee-with-plenty-of-cream shade.”
Sprigle’s transformation was completed with black-rimmed glasses and a cap that “drooped like a tam-o’-shanter” to cover his bald head. I guess this worked out for him just fine. As Sprigle mentions, passing as Black in the 1940s was largely a question of how someone presented and positioned themself in public. If a man who had coffee-with-plenty-of-cream-colored skin sat in the Black section of trains, patronized Black cafes, and traveled with an exclusively Black entourage, nobody would suspect that he was anything other than Black.
Griffin’s transformation was more … ballsy. After arriving in New Orleans, Griffin immediately contacted numerous dermatologists to discuss possible darkening measures. One of these doctors agreed to meet with him and promptly prescribed oral doses of methoxsalen, an anti-vitiligo drug. In combination with extended exposure to UV rays from a sunlamp, the methoxsalen caused Griffin to become dark-skinned within a week. The customary timeline for methoxsalen treatment was anywhere from six to twelve weeks, but because Griffin could not afford to wait that long, he significantly upped his dosage… And he paid a price for it.
Griffin complains throughout the book of feeling constantly on the verge of throwing up, and he was even forced to do blood tests to ensure that the abuse he was subjecting his liver to would not become fatal. Lacking Afro-textured hair, Griffin shaved his head. Any remaining patches of light skin that managed to evade the UV rays or drug treatment were blotted out with a dark stain.
In preparation for her first portion of the book, the Harlem stint, Halsell suntanned on the beaches of Puerto Rico, taking her pills before each session so that the photosensitizing drug could accelerate the darkening of her skin’s pigmentation.
Throughout her time in New York, she lost a bit of her color, which prompted a migration to the U.S. Virgin Islands to regain her desired hue before beginning the second phase of her Black life in the American South. Halsell had blue eyes, like me, so she took advantage of the new contact lens technology in order to achieve a racially coherent, brown-eyed look.
I didn’t get especially creative with my transformation. I didn’t go overboard. I didn’t feel I needed to. Then again, I also didn’t feel like I could.
It wasn’t as if there was anyone who I could ask for help. I couldn’t go to a dermatologist. I couldn’t present a medical doctor with the request of turning me into a Black man. And nor could I even consult a makeup or costume professional. It’s a different era. There was nobody I could turn to for help. Unlike the journalists who had gone before me, I had to figure out my transformation alone. I was pragmatic. I came up with something that worked.
I don’t know how developed the beauty and cosmetics industry was in the Jim Crow era, but I am a bit surprised that some
sort of makeup-oriented transformation wasn’t the obvious first choice for my predecessors. I guess they were probably less worried about skin cancer and the health effects of turbo-dosing relatively new and obscure pharmaceuticals.
In any case, I was convinced that a regular, commercially available, brown-colored foundation would be sufficient for me to achieve the necessary skin tone. The particular one I landed on was Maybelline’s “Mocha” shade — slightly darker than their “Coconut” product, but not quite as dark as “Java.” I figured it was best not to get too ambitious. I didn’t really feel like shaving my head, so I opted to go for an Afro wig, which would also serve the purpose of signaling my race more clearly to approaching cars while I stood on the shoulders.
My eyebrows could be darkened with a tinted pomade — a product that apparently comes in a thousand varieties. To deal with the issue of eye color, I simply picked out a pair of brown contact lenses. Buying the wig and the contact lenses was not that strange of an experience. I got these items at a costume store in Montreal before leaving for the States. I wasn’t paranoid during the purchase. I think the checkout lady probably just thought I was trying to pull off some sort of swarthy pirate look.
And more probably, the checkout lady didn’t even give my purchase a second thought. It’s true that I bought these items from a costume store, but it may as well have been a sex shop. The people in Montreal are such sickos that most of the other clients were clearly just picking out twisted new kinkfuel — lots of animal masks and handcuffs and steampunk paraphernalia and stuff like that. I’m sure the checkout lady there deals with so many freaks and debauchees that my Afro and contact lenses didn’t even raise her suspicions.
Buying the foundation and the tinted eyebrow pomade was more nerve-racking. I got this stuff from a CVS across the street from Vanderbilt’s Central Library. A Black girl was working the till, and I felt the urge to tell her that I was buying the products for my girlfriend, which seems kind of funny in hindsight. I’m sure that was already her assumption. I’m sure her assumption was not, “Hey, I bet this guy is buying theseAfro-oriented cosmetic products so that he can produce a modern adaptation of John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me.”
In hindsight, a lot of paranoia I felt throughout the trip lacked justification. Nobody suspected what I was doing. One factor that made the transformation less stressful and strenuous is the fact that I really didn’t need to show much skin. Despite the fact that I would be traveling in the summer heat, I figured it would be easiest to wear pants and long-sleeve shirts so that I would have a minimal area of exposure.
I wore black jeans and dark gray shirts to reduce the risk of noticeable makeup smears. All things considered, I did a good job. I wasn’t a movie-grade transracialist by any stretch. If footage of the Black me was shown on an IMAX screen, I’m sure someone in the theater would eventually spot a cream-colored blemish or an errant brown hair. But I didn’t need to be that good. I just needed to blend in. I just needed to get by. Ultimately, I just needed to convince the drivers who approached my spot on the shoulder that I was, in fact, Black.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
