“Black comes in all shades” we are often told. It’s true there are Black people across a wide colour spectrum and with the hyper-visibility of light skinned, often mixed race, Black people it seems the boundaries for what constitutes Blackness are ever expanding. Jessica Krug, a professor of African American history, was able to claim to be Black for years using it to bolster her career despite being fair skinned with just slightly wavy hair and no other Black features whatsoever. In doing so, she took away a role that is already incredibly difficult for Black women to achieve and put her Black students in a very difficult position having to now re-evaluate all their interactions knowing her identity was fraudulent. It seems that when we talk about what it means to be Black the focus is often on making light skinned people feel comfortable in and a part of the Black community, no interest is taken in the possibility of this kind of harm.
As a response to the Krug situation, and the surprisingly many other instances of fraudulent claims to Blackness, some have suggested a degree of caution ought to be taken by Black people towards people who claim to be mixed race. Others posture that to do so would be alienating to mixed people who already struggle with their mixed and often conflicting identities, we ought not to gatekeep Blackness. I argue that the there is a very easy way to tell the real from the fakes, Black people look Black.
“But Roni”, you ask, “you can’t just say there’s one way to look Black isn’t that racist?” Well first one must understand the conception of race and its inextricability from racism. Race is not biological, it is not a gene passed on from generation to generation, rather it is a symbolic category, based on phenotype or ancestry and constructed according to specific social and historical contexts, that is misrecognized as a natural category[1]. The differences seen between people around the world are real, but race turns this difference into stratification whereby whiteness comes to symbolise a natural right to power and non-whiteness is an inferiorised deviation from that. You do not understand race if you cannot come to terms with it as a social construct that has been reproduced and legitimated under white supremacy for centuries — there is no race without racism and no whiteness without its racialised Other. Blackness truly is about one’s appearance, it is on this basis that you are assigned a race and from this you receive your position in society. It necessarily has boundaries so as to ensure the oppression of millions on an arbitrary and wholly unscientific basis. Whilst we have often unified under the banner of Blackness, we did not name ourselves as such. It was forced upon us.
Mainstream understandings of racism, even with their poor understanding of the construction of race, have always emphasised it’s being a form of hate based on the colour of one’s skin. Why now is it a problem that race might be thought of in terms of appearance? When we are angry to find someone has been pretending to be Black is it not because we know the harm being perceived as Black puts you in the midst of? Is it not because a person pretending to be Black will never have truly experienced that because of how they look? It should be noted that these so-called “race-fishers” are almost always fair skinned, they couldn’t possibly know what it is like to navigate the world as a Black person when they simply do not look like one. Similarly, the conversation around colourism further emphasises the importance of appearance. Being lighter garners greater privileges in society, even if you are still visibly Black, and being darker worsens the experience of Blackness in a white supremacist world. If not appearance, then what is it that makes a person Black? Perhaps it’s immersion in Black cultures. Yet, we already tell non-Black people that growing up with Black people does not make them Black. This is because we all know implicitly that Blackness is about how we are perceived. The experience of Blackness has always been about the way you look, so why take offence at the idea that if you do not look Black (facial features, hair type, skin colour) you are not Black?
Black people of non-mixed heritage look Black, at most there may be question of whether they are mixed, but their Blackness is unquestionable. It is clear that our focus is on the treatment of mixed race Black people. We know that under white supremacy, whiteness is power. As stated earlier, we know that lighter skin garners privileges due to closer proximity to whiteness — you need only look at the plethora of light skinned women portraying the only Black woman character on various Netflix shows. Of course, some mixed race people are not particularly light skinned, so our focus is just on those that are. These people fall into three categories: visibly mixed with Black, racially ambiguous (those who’s race you cannot tell from merely looking at them) and white ‘passing’. Our focus narrows once again to the categories of racially ambiguous and white passing, these are where Blackness comes into question. The racially ambiguous person is exoticised particularly because of the almost excitement found from appearing to be from all over the world. The revelation that they have a Black parent might bring on various discomforts associated with Blackness but until that point, they do not navigate the world as a Black person, they live with the privileges that ambiguity and its proximity to whiteness provides. Their exoticisation puts them in harm’s way as a person of colour but not as a Black person. The white passing individual, however, navigates the world with the privilege that whiteness garners. Again, only the revelation of a Black parent puts them in harm’s way and opens them up to possible exoticisation and consequent fetishisation.
None of this negates any connection to Black cultures or people, or possible experiences of oppression under white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Rather, it is a question of the validity of claims to Blackness. When a non-Black person pretends to be Black, we get angry because they have not had to go through life as a Black person. If they were to receive a scholarship, for example, on the basis of their Blackness we would be enraged because such a scholarship exists as ‘compensation’ for the many barriers to education that exist for Black people due to the way we are perceived. If we know that racially ambiguous or white passing people have also not had to go through life as a Black person then why does this logic not extend to them too? Is there not something sinister in the idea that despite being seen as white or merely foreign most of your life, you could make claim to something made specifically to benefit those who have suffered through being seen as Black.
There is a tendency to twist words like this, to make out that the speaker wishes to expel anyone who is lighter than a paper bag from Black communities. Perhaps you think I am jealous of people lighter than I am, but do I not have reason to be? Who would not be jealous of the person who is not burdened with the mountain of racial debt[2] that Blackness begets? The person who is treated better because they are lighter or whiter than me. Is it not fair to be jealous of someone who benefits from the injustice that harms you? One might decry this as gatekeeping Blackness, but it is absurd to do so when we are not the ones who erected these gates. Regardless, I ask little of the reader. In fact, I have merely told you widely accepted truths about the Black experience. My only request is that you ask yourself why — knowing race’s inextricability from racism, knowing colourism and racism’s bases in appearance, knowing that immersion in Black cultures do not make you Black, knowing the benefits garnered by proximity to whiteness — you are still angry when I say you have to look Black to be Black.
[1] Desmond, M. & Emirbayer, M., 2009. WHAT IS RACIAL DOMINATION? Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 6(2), pp.335–355.
[2] Ruha Benjamin in Clarke, A.E. & Haraway, Donna Jeanne, 2018. Making kin not population, Chicago, IL : Prickly Paradigm Press
