The Messiness of Black Identity

“Black,” as in the capitalized identifier for the people, is everywhere. Is there not a strange air to its ubiquity? A feeling of religiosity? The writer publishing in the North American press can no longer be willful when deciding how she might like to dress the word. Many style guides, including the one used by this magazine, now capitalize the “B”: a person is Black; a culture is Black. This standard has even encroached on the genre of fiction, like a stop sign installed in the badlands. How does the satirist work around the imposition, constructing her nasty, sarcastic world of minstrelsy and sharp tongues? The race has been made proper.

“I believe that eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.” This was W. E. B. Du Bois, ministering to literate society at the turn of the twentieth century, about the word “negro.” In 1929, Du Bois, by then a star activist and editor, the ur-Black American intellectual, made the case again in a letter to Franklin Henry Hooper, his white editor at the Encyclopædia Britannica:

First of all, the word “Negro” which was capitalized in my manuscript and which is already capitalized in everything I write, has been changed to a small letter. I feel very strongly on this point. I regard the use of a small letter for the name of twelve million Americans and two hundred million human beings as a personal insult, and under no circumstances will I allow this article to be published unless the word “Negro” is capitalized in this article. Of course, elsewhere in the Encyclopedia you will follow your own rule.

The letter was part of a larger pressure campaign, supported by Du Bois’s contemporaries Alain Locke and W. A. Robinson, targeting the Britannica, the Times, and the other bulwarks of Western media. By 1930, the Times acquiesced. “It is not merely a typographical change, it is an act in recognition of racial respect for those who have been generations in the ‘lower case,’ ” the newspaper declared. A perfect echo of this dignity dogma appeared in the Times’ 2020 article “Why We’re Capitalizing Black.” An editor on the national desk is quoted as saying that “for many people the capitalization of that one letter is the difference between a color and a culture.” The Associated Press, in a piece announcing its adoption of the same rule, also riffed on the color-not-a-person argument, which rings to me, at its most elemental, as an erasure of the role that the Black Power and Black Pride movements played in the shaping of how the people address themselves. (“Negro” didn’t fall away as if a deciduous leaf; “Black” was agitated for.)

A month earlier, a police officer in Minneapolis had murdered George Floyd, pressing on his neck until he could no longer breathe. That feeling I mentioned, of a kind of religiosity associated with the capitalization of “Black,” stems from this context—the manic scene in which cultural institutions sought to brighten the imagined line separating them from the institutions of the state, by reasserting themselves as officers of language. The A.P., in its announcement, went full internationalist: the capitalized Black, its vice-president of standards wrote, promoted “an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa.”

The point was to denote and to define and to dignify, to bring the diaspora of dispersed Africans, former and present, into the hall of recognition enjoyed by the proper-noun ethnic categories. To shed Jesse Jackson’s heavy hyphen in the formerly enshrined “African-American.” To simultaneously give the Haitian, the Nigerian, and the American her distinctions while also linking them in sociological relation, implicitly rooted in an understanding of the Atlantic in which slavery launched the race. Here’s where my mind gets caught on the wide net, flung across continents and across time. Everyone knows what it means to capitalize “Black.” But how does it feel? On your tongue, on the page? If we act like affect isn’t what truly rules how we talk to, and around, one another, we won’t get to the whole of the matter.

Another time, another correspondence, although this time unanswered. Donald Harris, inflamed, writes a post for a Jamaican Web site, disciplining his eldest-born child, Kamala Harris, for her wanton assimilation. During her first Presidential campaign, which, in 2019, looked like it would be her only one, Kamala Harris had gone on “The Breakfast Club,” a radio show that has become an almost mandatory campaign stop for politicians seeking the Black vote, where she was asked a question about whether she had ever smoked marijuana. “Half of my family’s from Jamaica,” she replied. “Are you kidding me?” Her father called upon her entire matriarchal line in order to admonish her:

My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics.

Donald Harris’s post, just like his daughter’s joke, was a kind of mannered performance. The reaming was a hit among my friends and me, all of whom have parents who come from the Caribbean. We recognized his severity and his hyperbole, and then we recognized our laughing dismissal of his severity and his hyperbole as the mark of a cultural and generational difference. It is said that we don’t know much about Harris pater—aside from the fact that he is a Marxist bogeyman or miracle, depending on one’s place on the political spectrum—but, from the composition of his writings about family, I think we can glean something intense. He portrays himself as the proud Jamaican father, working hard to instill a sense of racial identity in his two children, taking them to visit his old schools in Kingston and in Port Antonio, fighting against the encroaching American secularities. “A neegroe from da eyelans,” is how he views the court viewing him, in the seventies, as he fought for custody of his children.

Kamala Harris and her campaigns, past and present, have actually made it a point not to focus too much on her race, or on her gender. Last week, Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, sat for their first televised interview, with CNN’s Dana Bash. Bash asked what Harris thought of Trump’s musing that she “turned Black” for political gain. “Same old tired playbook,” Harris replied, speaking not only of Trump but seemingly of media avarice. “Next question, please.” Right, true, and warranted. But the question of Harris’s race, although mainstreamed by Trump, wasn’t originated by him. There exists a loose federation of Black Americans who look upon Black non-Americans as siphons of what reparative bounty should be theirs. The descendance from slavery, according to them, baptized the real inheritors of the Black condition. (Needless to say, this is an ahistorical and inaccurate view of transatlantic slavery.) They make hay out of statistics that suggest the success of Black non-Americans: the education level of the Nigerian, the earning power of the West Indian. Their movement is called ADOS, or American Descendants of Slavery. They are few but vocal enough online that they have been falsely accused of being Russian bots. Unlike Trump, ADOS’s adherents cast a figure like Harris as something other than fraudulent; they see her, instead, as a usurper.

Most Black Americans don’t espouse the beliefs of ADOS. Plenty of Black Americans also have non-American ethnic identities. But the ADOS dissension is at the extreme end of a kind of conflict that is known as “diaspora warring.” Diaspora warring is typically petty, unserious—kitchen talk. (Who makes the best rice is always a point of argument.) But it is based in an acknowledgment of difference—that Black-as-race has supplanted, in everyday language, Blackness-as-ethnicity. In acknowledging difference, this warring, as we facetiously call it, clings to lines of demarcation. It’s Samuel L. Jackson, an American, on the occasion of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” starring Daniel Kaluuya, accusing British actors of taking roles that were meant for his countrymen. It’s Buju Banton, a Jamaican reggae artist, criticizing Afrobeat artists for making music that is apolitical and soulless. I think, too, of intranational conversation—critiques levelled by Black Texans, for example, toward Black Northerners, calling them out for misapprehending the regional particularity of Juneteenth. And then there’s the Olympics. For years, Sha’Carri Richardson, the American sprinter, has annoyed some Jamaican track-and-field fans, who have taken her brashness as unearned hubris. Usain Bolt once played the wise man, suggesting that Richardson focus less on trash-talking and more on improving her game. This summer, during the Paris Games, some bits of the beef returned, but the mood was more playful. A couple of months earlier, Richardson had come to the Jamaica Athletics Invitational in Kingston. There, everyone took her as a sister.