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.

  • Varyk
    26·
    7 months ago

    Okay, wow.

    I came here to point out that this project has been done multiple times in the past, most popularly in black like me by Howard griffin, but the quotes that this new guy has written down and said are unbelievably hubristic and unaware.

    I thought black like me was an interesting book because it came across more as a white guy trying to understand the black world so that he could personally better live in a world so shattered by adverse race relations, but he never insisted that people had to read it or made the type of self-agrandizing claims this new guy is making.

    This forster guy! Yikes.

    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.”

    he stands by his statement in the book summary on Amazon, where he calls Seven Shoulders “the most important book on American race relations that has ever been written.”

    “If I thought this would be the second best book, I wouldn’t put it out,” he said.

    Doesn’t sound like forster has the right perspective to conduct this research or publish this book, even if he had less than insulting intentions. Which, maybe he didn’t, because those quotes are insane.