On Resisting Racial Interlopers
There are so many beautiful ways of being Black. We inherit the diverse legacies of our ancestors. To be Black American means to be a descendant of Black Africans, often with mixed racial and ethnic heritage, including ancestors who are Indigenous, European, and from all over the world. Our experiences of Blackness are as variable as all human experiences. We create networks of meaning systems, ways of maintaining our traditions of understanding and interpretation according to cultural and spiritual logic passed down through generations.
As we grow up, Black Americans are acculturated and socialized in different communities of Blackness. Our nationalities, our neighborhoods, languages, economic positions, education, our lineage places us in different cultural circumstances. Some of us are separated from our African lineage and from Black American communities, growing up in predominantly white situations. Some of us change social location over time, or experience separation from our communities by economic circumstance, language differences, colorism, institutionalization, migration. The complicated and constantly changing construction of race throughout U.S. history has meant that Blackness is often reduced to a monolith in the national imagination, which disguises the beautiful abundance of Black experience. Black identity has meaning far beyond any opposition to whiteness. Blackness is a politicized cultural identity that includes cultural hybridity and transformation.
Our understanding of the range of experience within Blackness means that we have reason to trust each other’s self-representation. We know that we cannot assume that someone is not Black based on appearance or acculturation alone. Rather, we must learn the history of that person’s experience with Blackness. Sometimes there are signifiers — ways we communicate with each other, quickly, that we see each other, we recognize one another. But we have to leave room in the boundaries of Blackness for the possibility that some of us come later to the cookout — that is to say that within the context of systemic anti-Blackness, we are socialized at different rates into Blackness as a cultural and political identity. We don’t define race and culture as oppositional, hierarchal monoliths because our experiences in our families and communities teach us that these constructions can never account for the fullness of Black experiences.
Whiteness, particularly in the U.S., is constructed as oppositional to Blackness. The one-drop rule codified a specific understanding of race in this country, with a clear boundary between Black and white (wherein whiteness is equated with humanity). In New Orleans, where I live, French and Spanish colonizers further formalized racial categories by dividing Blackness according to skin color, hair texture, facial features, and heritage. This tactic of explicit white supremacy seeks to divide Black identity to the point of rendering it meaningless among Black people. Our ancestors were labeled according to their proximity to whiteness. Claiming Black as a collective identity has been an intentional political move, a reclamation of our own definitions of our culture as a people, connecting us across experience, across the Diaspora. Despite this, in 2020, white people still understand Blackness as something like, “a state of not being white.”
Systemic racism in this country is specifically anti-Black and anti-Indigenous, although it negatively impacts all people of color. White people view Black and Indigenous lives and identities as a cultural playground, a place for them to experiment with our cultural meanings as they decide who they would like to be. In the minds of white people, Black and Indigenous cultures are endless resources for them to take from at will, whether or not they are in any way connected to the lives of Black and Indigenous people. We have documented the history of white cultural theft in every realm of society, including art, music, science, dance, intellectual history, philosophy, religion, architecture, language, and fashion. In their movies, we are often depicted as magical negroes, sidekicks, and savages, existing only to serve in the growth and development of a white protagonist. They praise our resilience, our strength, our ability to stay happy and alive as they continue to murder us in broad daylight and deny our access to every valuable social resource. There are white people with well-funded careers in anti-racism and “diversity” work, paid to teach other white people about their whiteness, routinely ignoring the tradition of brilliant Black scholarship on the construction of race and its consequences.
What if you could benefit from the rich cultural legacies of Blackness and Indigeneity without experiencing any of the social erasure and spirit denial? What if you could be white and avoid accountability for whiteness? White people venture into their copycat versions of Blackness and Indigeneity to avoid all consequences of their racial imaginations. The idea of Blackfishing accounts for the ways white people strategically identify with Blackness from a place of social privilege, particularly in the digital realm. White models wear Black hairstyles and brown makeup to imitate Black cultural aesthetics. White people use Black vernacular on social media as cultural currency, while continuing to collude with white supremacy in their daily lives. It is even used as a corporate marketing strategy, with businesses attempting to appear to be connected to Blackness and Indigeneity without any accountability to our communities. And now, we have examples of white people constructing entire Black and Indigenous identities and attempting to “live” them.
I can think of three immediate examples of this. (I bet you can guess who I’ll name!) The first is Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who identifies as Black and “transracial” and led a chapter of the NAACP. The second is Jessica Krug, the white woman who falsely assumed three different Black and Latinx identities and built a career as an expert professor of Black history and an activist against racism. The third is BethAnn McLaughlin, the white woman who created an anonymous twitter account @Sciencing_Bi where she pretended to be a queer Hopi Indigenous woman professor who contracted coronavirus and died. A lot has been written about these three cases, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to psychologize these violent white people. Often in the media, their choices are attributed to an experience of rejection, trauma, and mental illness. They are treated as exceptional cases, people we cannot take as reflections of the status quo. I believe, however, that their behavior is simply an extension of a white supremacist logic that operates in all of our social systems. Whether or not they live with mental illness, their choices align with normalized anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racist thinking. Their choices to exploit our collective identities in an attempt to work through their personal identity has violently negative consequences for Black and Indigenous people.
First of all, interlopers use their false identity to claim an authority based in lived experience. All three of my reference examples leveraged their fake identities as Black and Indigenous people to establish careers as representatives of a culture not their own, even going so far as silencing Black and Indigenous people and gaslighting students of color. Not only have they occupied some of the few professional positions as trusted experts available to us, but their deployment of a poorly formed racial aesthetic and deficient political logic undermines and eclipses our honest experiential insights. We process information over generations, transforming our collective consciousness to heal from constant violence and to fight for the transformation of a violent society. Interlopers attempt to imitate the visible manifestations of a meaning system they will never understand. They co-opt and distort our intellectual histories. They directly profit from their participation in our erasure.
Second, these racial interlopers exploit the ambiguity of socially constructed racial categories. Black and Indigenous people maintain a complex understanding of race, rather than reducing Blackness or Indigeneity to phenotype or acculturation alone. Interlopers exploit our trust in self-representation, undermining our ability to organize according to our own racial logic. How can we believe each other when there are posers among us?
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Third, they completely avoid accountability for their whiteness. How can we hold white professors accountable for their flawed assumptions when we don’t know that they’re white? How can we defend ourselves from the insidious ways they exploit us when they aren’t honest about their relationship to our culture? The interlopers also know that white people are less likely to challenge their opinions when they claim a different base of understanding. It’s an intentional, toxic foil to avoid all forms of racial accountability.
Non-Black people of color can engage in all of these Blackfishing activities, as well, by making strategic choices to benefit from Black cultural capital without any of the social and spiritual costs of full-time Blackness. How do we, as Black people, protect our ability to build with each other based on our sacred understandings of our collective identity?
I propose three major considerations in our discussion of the boundaries of Blackness. These are not meant to summarize a response to Blackfishing or whatever these people do next. Rather, I am beginning to think through a practical collective strategy that resists the potential damage to our collective identity caused by interlopers.
1. We define Blackness by being Black.
There’s a moment in the documentary about Rachel Dolezal on Netflix, “The Rachel Divide,” where she is unsure of whether to mark Black or white on her newborn child’s birth certificate. She acknowledges, out loud, that the child will be categorized according to her race as the mother. Then she says, “I am going to remain unapologetically Black, but I also am not going to allow my baby to be whitewashed. But if you’re charged with falsifying a legal form, then it can be a felony.” Basically, she is deciding whether or not to break the law by lying about being Black.
Black people don’t have this choice or this dilemma. Documentation doesn’t determine our identity. This is precisely the reason to resist the oppressor’s definitions of our cultural identity — all of them. The one-drop rule doesn’t determine our identity. “How the cops perceive us” doesn’t determine our identity, although it is a determinant in our experience. Our understanding of Blackness must continue to account for our varied cultural and political experiences of race. You know if you are Black. If you are new to your Blackness somehow, it is your responsibility to be transparent about that fact, which brings me to my next consideration.
2. We can and should prioritize transparency of heritage and acculturation.
“Where your grandma stay?” “Where did you go to high school?” “Who are your people?” There are many ways that Black people seek to place each other in community, often in different ways depending on the city. If we acknowledge the range of experiences we have as Black people, it becomes easier to talk about our different understandings of our racial identity. I’m wary of people who are evasive or defensive in response to questions about their heritage, especially when they claim to represent a racial community. Identifying as Black American does not communicate your familiarity with Black American cultural contexts. Of course, many of us do not know our lineage, one of the intentional cruelties of American racism. Still, we know our experiences with Blackness and whiteness, and how it has shaped us. Blackness is not a social experiment. It is a sacred legacy. How are you connected? Who are your people?
3. Accountability to local Black communities.
Although my mother’s family is from New Orleans and still lives here, I never grew up here. I visited often as a child, but I didn’t go to school here growing up, and I was not directly socialized into local Black communities in New Orleans. I make this clear when I work with local organizations, institutions, and collectives. As someone who moved here within the last decade, I understand that even my passive choices have the potential to contribute to either the destruction or the fortification of local Black and Indigenous communities. Where I choose to live and work, the projects I take on, the social life I create, the policies I support, the language I use — all of these choices have the potential to impact Black and Indigenous people who built and sustain this city.
The university system that Jessica Krug and BethAnn McLaughlin exploited is designed to remove this level of local accountability. Professors are hired from around the world, and the university campus is treated as a separate world from the community it is located within. Online interactions further remove this type of transparency, allowing people to self-identify without any context.
When people claim to be representatives of a community, let’s ask about their connections to that community. Are their choices and actions aligned with the interests and priorities of local communities? Do they have social networks with Black and Indigenous people who grew up in local communities? Who can vouch for them? Have they always identified with the communities they claim to represent?
Transparency facilitates trust. These considerations alone won’t prevent Blackfishing or any of the many other ways non-Black people dip their toes into our cultural wealth. Even so, we can be intentional about keeping our systems of meaning intact long after the interlopers are exposed. They should not have the power to impact or undermine our collective identity. Our lives as Black people define Blackness in the ways that matter.
