Notes

1. See Damon Young, “I Have Post-Brokeness Stress Disorder,” New York Times, June 9, 2018; Brittany Allen, “‘Old’ Money: Who Gets to Have It, and Who Gets to Be It?” Shondaland.com, June 14, 2018, www.shondaland.com/live/family/a21349872/old-money/.

2. See Gillian B. White, “How Black Middle-Class Kids Become Poor Adults,” Atlantic, January 19, 2015, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/how-black-middle-class-kids-become-black-lower-class-adults/384613/; see also Emily Badger, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce, and Kevin Quealy, “Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys,” New York Times, March 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html. The latter piece, despite its misleading focus on only black boys/men, and attention largely to income and not wealth, nonetheless illustrates the racial disparity I speak of.

3. As andré carrington has noted, “The Andre Walker system is a quasi-scientific method for categorizing texture according to the shape, appearance, and structure of individual strands and full heads of hair, including the hair’s resistance to normative beautification practices.” See carrington, “Spectacular Intimacies: Texture, Ethnicity, and a Touch of Black Cultural Politics,” Souls 19, no. 2 (2017): 189. See also Andre Walker, Andre Talks Hair (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).

4. No, really. My entire adolescence we watched TV on a little black-and-white tabletop set in the kitchen. U.S. retailers stopped selling black-and-white TV sets in the early 1990s, around the time I graduated from high school.

5. Megan Zahneis, “Women of Color in Academe Make 67 Cents for Every Dollar Paid to White Men,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2018.

6. Patricia J. Williams, Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 90.

1. Bob Hughes, “Are We in a Post-racial World? In a Word, NO! Make That, Hell No!” May 2, 2016, http://deanbobhughes.blogspot.com/2016/05/are-we-in-post-racial-world-in-word-no.html. The black woman colleague, Yoshiko Harden, goes unnamed in Hughes’s original blog post but was eventually named in follow-up reporting about the incident. See Isolde Raftery, “9 Heartbreaking Responses to ‘A Man Shouts Racial Slurs at a Seattle Starbucks,’” KUOW.org. June 9, 2016, https://kuow.org/stories/9-heartbreaking-responses-man-shouts-racial-slurs-seattle-starbucks/

2. The notion of black privilege itself as provocation is certainly relevant to an anecdote like this one, but similar incidents also remind us that blackness can often blind non-black observers even to the presence of privilege. Writer and comedian W. Kamau Bell’s story of being violently shooed away from a Bay Area coffee shop in 2015 by a waitress who assumed he was “selling something” (i.e., soliciting legitimate white patrons) is just one of many examples of blacks of means being mistaken for, and treated as, outsiders and Others to a scene of privilege. This is especially acute in Bell’s narrative, because he contrasts his treatment by the restaurant staff with the treatment of a dreadlocked, possibly homeless white man who panhandled freely in front of the restaurant that same day, wearing similar casual clothes (a hoodie). With significant sarcasm, Bell notes of this man, who was never similarly approached by café staff, “I guess in his hoodie he had a more Mark Zuckerberg type of feeling than me.” See Bell, “Happy Birthday! Have Some Racism from Elmwood Cafe!” January 28, 2015, http://www.wkamaubell.com/blog/2015/01/happy-birthday-have-some-racism-from-elmwood-cafe.

3. As Simone Browne has recently pointed out, following Sylvia Wynter, the chapter of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks originally translated from the French as “The Fact of Blackness” was in later editions shifted to “The Lived Experience of the Black.” As Browne notes, “The ‘Blackness’ in the former could be taken to mean, as Wynter has put it, ‘Blackness as an objective fact’ while ‘The Lived Experience of the Black’ speaks to a focus on the imposition of race in black life, where one’s being is experienced through others.” It is this latter sense that Hughes’s narrative of being seen not as two college administrators but as two black people seems to invoke. Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 7.

4. Lisa B. Thompson, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 3.

5. The “social positions” quotation is from Sherry Ortner, “Identities: The Hidden Life of Class,” Journal of Anthropological Research 54, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 7; the “class culture” quotation is from Julie Bettie, Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity (2003; Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), 42.

6. Ortner, “Identities,” 8–9.

7. My use of “performativity” is meant to suggest Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). For a foundational text on identity (specifically, gender) and performance, see also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati call this social performance “working identity” and define it, fittingly, as “a range of racially associated ways of being” and a “set of racial criteria people can employ to ascertain not simply whether a person is black in terms of how she looks but whether that person is black in terms of how she is perceived to act.” See Carbado and Gulati, Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America (2013; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1. Perhaps because of their disciplinary training and approach (both Carbado and Gulati are law professors), their analysis of these performances is limited to legally protected categories of “race” and “gender,” with almost no attention to how the social or cultural labor of “Working Identity” might be informed by class status. Indeed, class as a discrete or intersectional identity category is so far from Carbado and Gulati’s analysis that the words “class,” “economy/economics,” “labor,” “money,” “privilege,” “wealth,” or “work” do not even appear in the book’s index. The phrase “types of work” does appear as a sub-term under the index category “Workplace” but leads to a discussion of “advancement tasks” versus “citizenship tasks” (54) in professional workplaces, specifically “law school faculties and law firms” (55).

8. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978; New York: Macmillan, 2013), 340, 341.

9. Bettie, Women without Class, 42, 41.

10. Ortner, “Identities,” 6.

11. See Madhu Dubey’s Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) for an excellent breakdown of how these shifting economic structures and social circumstances have shaped black experience in the postmodern era. For a sociological text that addresses some of these concerns specifically for black communities, see Benjamin P. Bowser’s The Black Middle Class: Social Mobility—and Vulnerability (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2006). See also new research on the widening black-white wealth gap: Chuck Collins, Dedrick Asante-Muhammed, Emanuel Nieves, Josh Hoxie, Report: The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide Is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class (Institute for Policy Studies, September 11, 2017).

12. Lisa Henderson, Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 5. As Henderson notes, “cultural criticism” is particularly well suited to address this variation that exists between liberal and Marxist understandings of class, better allowing us to understand how “class categories work in vernacular and analytic ways to mark a cultural universe” (5).

13. Rita Felski, “Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class,” PMLA 115, no. 1 (2000): 34.

14. Ortner, “Identities,” 8.

15. Ortner, “Identities,” 10.

16. For more on the ways that “bourgeois” status is and historically has been as much a cultural as a structural position for black Americans collectively and systematically denied access to economic resources, see Karyn Lacy, Blue Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Kevin Kelly Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

17. See Abby Goodnough, “Harvard Professor Jailed; Officer Is Accused of Bias,” New York Times, July 20, 2009, A13; Robin Givhan, “Oprah and the View from Outside Hermes’ Paris Door,” Washington Post, June 24, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/23/AR2005062302086.html.

18. Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 10, 13.

19. Jared Sexton, “Unbearable Blackness,” Cultural Critique 90 (Spring 2015): 168. For the Spillers reference, see Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 68; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

20. Sexton, “Unbearable Blackness,” 159.

21. Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 27. See also Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).

22. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Did Black People Own Slaves?” The Root, March 4, 2013, https://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-slaves-1790895436; and Thomas J. Pressly, “‘The Known World’ of Free Black Slaveholders: A Research Note on the Scholarship of Carter G. Woodson,” Journal of African American History 91, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 81–87.

23. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Stephen M. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 2. Robinson uses the phrase “racial capitalism” to highlight the ways that capitalism expanded upon—rather than jettisoned—the racialism of feudal Europe (28). He also, however, points out the evident links between “slave labor, the slave trade, and the weaving of . . . early capitalist economies” (116).

24. See Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

25. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 44.

26. For more on black fungibility as the “ontological state of Blackness,” see Tiffany King, “Labor’s Aphasia: Toward Antiblackness as Constitutive to Settler Colonialism,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, blog post, June 10, 2014, https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/labors-aphasia-toward-antiblackness-as-constitutive-to-settler-colonialism/. The foundational text for this line of argument about blackness is, of course, Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

27. Greg Thomas, “PROUD FLESH: Editorial Statement,” PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture 1 (2002): 1.

28. Young, Embodying Black Experience, 20.

29. Young, Embodying Black Experience, 20.

30. Young, Embodying Black Experience, 20.

31. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (1979; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 102.

32. Bourdieu, Distinction, 466.

33. Bourdieu, Distinction, 466.

34. Bourdieu, Distinction, 466.

35. Nicole Fleetwood brilliantly addresses this notion of black women’s (visual) excess, which she describes using the phrase “excess flesh,” in her book Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); see esp. 105–46.

36. The company later admitted that these claims of verbal and physical abuse were false and formally apologized to the book club’s members. The women’s $11 million lawsuit against the company was settled in 2016. See Katie Rogers, “#LaughingWhileBlack Wine Train Lawsuit Is Settled,” New York Times, April 20, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/us/women-settle-11-million-lawsuit-with-napa-valley-wine-train.html.

37. Young, Embodying Black Experience, 11; Sexton, “Unbearable Blackness,” 162.

38. Zandria Robinson, This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014): 36.

39. Patricia J. Williams, Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 109.

40. Issa Rae, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, season 2, episode 8, http://www.awkwardblackgirl.com/season-2/episode-8.

41. Given the way that “coloured” or mixed-race peoples in South Africa under apartheid were both legally and socially stratified from black Africans, Rae likely makes this character not just light-skinned but South African in order to emphasize the ambiguity of his racial identity—throughout their interaction J seems confused and unable to read precisely what Ty is claiming, racially—and to signal to viewers the particular irony of Ty’s exclusion of J from “blackness.”

42. P. Williams, Open House, 109.

43. P. Williams, Open House, 109. I discuss this implicit link in chapter 4 of my first book, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 2007); see esp. 119–23.

44. Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 4.

45. See Joni Hersch, “Profiling the New Immigrant Worker: The Effects of Skin Color and Height,” Journal of Labor Economics 26, no. 2 (2008): 345–86. A New York Times article about this study recounts the distinct economic advantage of light skin for ethnic immigrants to the United States. Quoting Hersch, the article notes, “On average being one shade lighter has about the same effect [on income] as having an additional year of education.” Indeed, advantages based on skin color seemed to transcend racial categories: “Dr. Hersch took into consideration other factors that could affect wages, like English-language proficiency, education, occupation, race or country of origin, and found that skin tone still seemed to make a difference in earnings. That meant that if two similar immigrants from Bangladesh, for example, came to the United States at the same time, with the same occupation and ability to speak English, the lighter-skinned one would make more money on average.” Hersch’s analysis found that despite the existence of global colorism, this “skin-color advantage was not based on preferential treatment for light-skinned people in their country of origin. The bias . . . occurs in the United States.” Associated Press, “Study of Immigrants Links Lighter Skin and Higher Income,” New York Times, January 28, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/us/28immig.html?mcubz=3.

For a foundational scholarly text on black colorism, see Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, The Color Complex (Revised): The Politics of Skin Color in a New Millennium (1992; New York: Anchor Books, 2013); see also Kimberly Jade Norwood, ed., Color Matters: Skin Tone Bias and the Myth of a Postracial America (New York: Routledge, 2014). Fiction and memoir that have tackled intraracial colorism include Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929), Ernest Gaines’s Catherine Carmier (1964), and Marita Golden’s Don’t Play in the Sun (2005).

46. Linda Chavers, “Cops Ignore Me Because I Have Light Skin: That Just Reaffirms Their Racism,” The Guardian, August 13, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/13/cops-racial-profiling-light-skinned-black-woman.

47. Lance Hannon, “White Colorism,” Social Currents 2, no.1 (March 2015): 13–21. See also Avi Ben-Zeev, Tara C. Dennehy, Robin I. Goodrich, Branden S. Kolarik, and Mark W. Geisler, “When an ‘Educated’ Black Man Becomes Lighter in the Mind’s Eye: Evidence for a Skin Tone Memory Bias,” SAGE Open 4, no. 1 (January 9, 2014): 1–9.

48. Bourdieu, Distinction, 70. Notably, despite whites’ clear preference for lighter skin and the resultant pervasiveness of colorism both inter- and intraracially, most blacks do not see light skin color as a disqualifier from blackness. See Jennifer L. Hochschild and Vesla Weaver, “The Skin Color Paradox and the American Racial Order,” Social Forces 86, no. 2 (2007): 643–70. For a brilliant analysis of the racialized meaning of “beauty” in the United States, see Tressie McMillan Cottom, “In the Name of Beauty,” Thick: And Other Essays (New York: New Press, 2018), 33–72.

49. Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry (New York: Macaulay, 1929); Charles W. Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899). We might think, as well, of the dynamics surrounding the Creole title character of Ernest Gaines’s novel Catherine Carmier (New York: Atheneum, 1964), or, for a more recent, nonfiction example, Toi Derricotte’s poignant memoir, The Black Notebooks (New York: Norton, 1997).

50. Cottom, “In the Name of Beauty,” 56, 45.

51. Bourdieu, Distinction, 71–72.

52. See Margo Jefferson’s memoir and social history of the black bourgeoisie, Negroland (New York: Pantheon, 2015). See also Graham, Our Kind of People.

53. Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 84.

54. The example of James Blake, a light-skinned biracial former tennis pro who was tackled and arrested by a New York Police Department officer in September 2015 as he stood in front of his upscale midtown hotel, suggests, however, that whatever privilege light skin affords is incomplete and insufficient “protection.” See Benjamin Mueller, Al Baker, and Liz Robbins, “Swift Apologies in Harsh Arrest of a Tennis Star,” New York Times, September 10, 2015, A1.

55. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, for instance, situates “The Contemporary Period” just after the “The Black Arts Era, 1960–1975,” suggesting rather than stating outright that “contemporary” African American literature spans from 1975 to the present. While we need not take the Norton as the sole authority on African American literary history, it shares this delineation of the “contemporary” with the Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature as well as the Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, the appendix of which outlines black literature’s historical trajectory, describing work from the 1970s onward as “contemporary.” These correspondences suggest, then, some professional consensus, at least on the approximate beginning of the “contemporary” era.

56. Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

57. See Nelson George, Buppies, B-Boys, Baps and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

58. Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3, emphasis added. Neal has since shifted his own terminology from “post-soul” to both “postblack” and “NewBlack,” but neither of these terms is as compelling for me, in part because each suggests a moving beyond blackness that I see as an impossibility. For more on “soul” as an analogue for Black Power–era blackness, see Monique Guillory and Richard Green, Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure (New York: New York University Press, 1998), esp. 1–2.

59. Andrea Lee was born in 1953, Percival Everett and Reginald McKnight in 1956, Spike Lee in 1957, and Shay Youngblood in 1959. Trey Ellis was born in 1962, Michael Thomas in 1967, Rebecca Walker and Colson Whitehead both in 1969, and Danzy Senna in 1970. Toni Morrison was born in 1931.

60. Bertram D. Ashe, “Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction,” African American Review 41, no. 4 (2007): 611.

61. Neal, Soul Babies, 103. While this point is persuasive, I might resist the way that Neal opposes “objectivity” to “nostalgia,” largely because it is less clear to me that the anti-nostalgia motivating some post-soul critique is entirely “objective”—the very notion of nostalgia, which implies a certain kind of pleasure in and fetishization of memory, also suggests, for instance, the possibility of anger, confusion, or resentment on the part of those who cannot credibly participate in this pleasure. We might recall Elizabeth Alexander’s observation of some middle-class black male characters from the late 1980s and early 1990s, that their “narrative ennui,” a self-distancing from “stereotypical black-pride,” actually reveals “a deeper and more fundamental rage at both received Civil Rights rhetoric and attendant narratives of patriarchal black manhood, which, in some fundamental way, have left them feeling both constrained and at sea.” Alexander, The Black Interior (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2004), 148–49.

62. Jenkins, Private Lives, Proper Relations, 23.

63. Michelle M. Wright, The Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 34.

64. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 133–34.

65. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 7.

66. R. Williams, Marxism and Literature 133.

67. Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 10, emphasis added.

68. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 54.

69. Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 223. I use the significantly outdated term “late capitalism” (Jameson) in concert with the currently more popular but also contested terminology of “neoliberalism” here to call attention, again, to the evolving and emergent nature of the “present” and the ways that such large-scale theoretical frameworks of our economic and social world themselves fragment and shift over time, in ways neither orderly nor absolute. From my vantage point in 2018, I might also note the numerous pronouncements of the End of Neoliberalism that have accompanied Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency.

70. Sexton, “Unbearable Blackness,” 168.

71. Roland Murray, “The Time of Breach: Class Division and the Contemporary African American Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 43, no. 1 (2010): 16.

72. Murray, “The Time of Breach,” 13.

73. Hortense Spillers, “Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date,” Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 459.

74. Jessica Marie Johnson, “Black Love Post-Death,” Medium, September 23, 2015, https://medium.com/focus-series/black-love-post-death-cef524ac3132.

75. See Bertram D. Ashe, “‘Under the Umbrella of Black Civilization’: A Conversation with Reginald McKnight,” African American Review 35, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 427–37.

76. C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 8.

77. Andrea Lee, Sarah Phillips, foreword by Valerie Smith (1984; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

78. Adrienne McCormick, “Is This Resistance? African American Postmodernism in Sarah Phillips,” Callaloo 27, no. 3 (2004): 817.

79. McCormick, “Is This Resistance?” 814.

80. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 3.

81. Bourdieu, Distinction, 207.

82. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 19.

83. McCormick, “Is This Resistance?” 823.

84. Coates, Between the World and Me, 107.

1. Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 17.

2. Graham, Our Kind of People, 17.

3. Graham, Our Kind of People, 4.

4. See F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (1991; University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001), esp. 4–6 and 13–16.

5. Harryette Mullen, “Optic White,” diacritics 24 (Summer–Fall 1994): 81.

6. The quotation marks around “natural” mark the point that the body cannot be understood as a “raw” or originary source existing prior to the intervention of culture; the work of Hortense Spillers, Elizabeth Alexander, Maude Hines, and others suggests that the (black, female) body is culturally marked and interpreted even at its most “raw.” I use the phrase “raw text,” then, only to suggest a given body’s phenotypical characteristics prior to deliberate manipulation—those one is born with, so to speak. See Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 257–79; Alexander, The Black Interior (New York: Graywolf Press, 2004); and Hines, “Body Language: Corporeal Semiotics, Literary Resistance,” in Body Politics and the Fictional Double, ed. Debra Walker King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 38–55.

7. Karyn R. Lacy, Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 26.

8. Lacy, Blue-Chip Black, 29.

9. Lacy, Blue-Chip Black, 29.

10. The body of literature on this topic across sociology (let alone psychology and anthropology) is more extensive than can be reasonably summarized here, but for representative work about education and social class formation, stratification, and mobility, see, e.g., Aaron Pallas, “The Effects of Schooling on Individual Lives,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Education, ed. Maureen T. Hallinan (New York: Springer, 2000), 499–525; Paul W. Kingston, Ryan Hubbard, Brent Lapp, Paul Schroeder, and Julia Wilson, “Why Education Matters,” Sociology of Education 76, no. 1 (2003): 53–70; Hiroshi Ishida, Walter Muller, and John M. Ridge, “Class Origin, Class Destination, and Education: A Cross-National Study of Ten Industrial Nations,” American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 1 (1995): 145–93; Joan M. Osgrove, “Belonging and Wanting: Meanings of Social Class Background for Women’s Constructions of their College Experiences,” Journal of Social Issues 59, no. 4 (2003): 771–84; and Elizabeth Aries and Maynard Seider, “The Interactive Relationship between Class Identity and the College Experience: The Case of Lower Income Students,” Qualitative Sociology 28, no. 4 (2005): 419–43. It is also worth noting recent research that disputes received knowledge about education as a major factor in social mobility, though even this work suggests that higher education plays a stronger role than primary and secondary schools. See Jesse Rothstein, UC Berkeley and National Bureau of Economic Research, “Inequality of Educational Opportunity? Schools as Mediators of the Intergenerational Transmission of Income” (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2018), 1–35.

11. Elizabeth R. Cole and Safiya R. Omari, “Race, Class and the Dilemmas of Upward Mobility for African Americans,” Journal of Social Issues 59, no. 4 (2003): 799.

12. Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (New York and London: New Press, 2017), 21.

13. Graham, Our Kind of People, 17.

14. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed. (2001; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 13.

15. See Adolph Reed, “Black Particularity Reconsidered,” Telos 39 (Spring 1979): 71–93; and Cornel West, “The Paradox of the African American Rebellion,” in Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, ed. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 22–38. See also Lacy, Blue-Chip Black, 30.

16. Here I should also note that the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case, which ruled laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional, was decided in 1967. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to address mixed-race history—for a thorough discussion of this history see Naomi Pabst, “Blackness/Mixedness: Contestations over Crossing Signs,” Cultural Critique 54 (Spring 2003): 178–212—it certainly might be useful to keep in mind that the metaphoric value of the miscegenated-appearing black body also would have shifted as interracial unions and their offspring gained legal sanction. My thanks to Stefanie Dunning for reminding me of this point.

17. Although my use of the word symbolic evokes Lacan’s symbolic order, I am less interested in a straightforwardly psychoanalytic interpretation of the penetrated-by-whiteness trope of black class privilege, although this approach has provided a rich field of inquiry for other critics. Margo Natalie Crawford’s work, for instance, while not concerned specifically with class, analyzes skin color in American fiction through the Freudian concept of the fetish and the Lacanian phallus. See Crawford, Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008). See also Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (1953; New York: Norton, 1977).

18. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

19. Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 109. While Fleetwood coins the term “excess flesh” to reference, specifically, the “too much”-ness of black women’s bodies in the visual field, the notion of black embodiment as a kind of social and political surfeit has a broader history. Moira Gatens suggests, for instance, that “At different times, different kinds of beings have been excluded from the pact [of the modern body politic], often simply by virtue of their corporeal specificity. Slaves, foreigners, women, the conquered, children, the working classes, have all been excluded from political participation, at one time or another, by their bodily specificity.” Gatens, “Corporeal Representation and the Body Politic,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 83.

20. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 23.

21. See William Muraskin, Middle Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 12. See also Derrick E. White, “‘Blacks Who Had Not Themselves Personally Suffered Illegal Discrimination’: The Symbolic Incorporation of the Black Middle Class,” in Race and the Foundations of Knowledge: Cultural Amnesia in the Academy, ed. Joseph Young and Jana Evans Braziel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 197–98. For more on social class and black aspiration see Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Kevin Kelly Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

22. andré m. carrington, “Spectacular Intimacies: Texture, Ethnicity, and a Touch of Black Cultural Politics,” Souls 19, no. 2 (2017): 179.

23. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3; Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998), xvii.

24. Eve Allegra Raimon, The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Antislavery Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 4.

25. Raimon, The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited, 5. As numerous scholars have pointed out regarding Harriet Jacobs’s narrative, however, too much emphasis on this sexual vulnerability and attendant violation by white men had the potential to alienate white female readers, so Jacobs was careful to omit details of her own ordeal. See Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861; Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2001).

26. For more on intraracial colorism, see Jennifer Hochschild and Vesla Weaver, “The Skin Color Paradox and the Racial Order,” Social Forces 86, no. 2 (December 2007): 643–70. See also Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, eds., The Color Complex (1992; New York: Anchor, 1993); and Cedric Herring, Verna M. Keith, and Hayward Derrick Horton, eds., Skin Deep: How Race and Complexion Matter in the “Color-Blind” Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). For an example of intraracial resentment of lighter women by darker women, see also Marita Golden, Don’t Play in the Sun (New York: Anchor, 2004).

27. While Pabst justifiably critiques “the dismissive ways that ‘light-skinned elites’ are treated and conflated with black/white interracial subjects” (“Blackness/Mixedness,” 197) in black literature and criticism, she also acknowledges the “overinvoked” and “ubiquitous” (195) nature of the tragic mulatto trope. Rather than asserting a genuine equivalence between “light-skinned elites” and actual mixed-race subjects, I am interested in noting the way that light-skinned bodies often evoke the long-standing trope of the “tragic mulatto” no matter what their parentage.

28. Toi Derricotte, The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey (1997; New York: Norton, 1999), 68, 77.

29. Perhaps due to renewed interest in issues of class, race, and postmodern identity—all of which are addressed in Tar Baby—numerous critics have turned to Morrison’s text in the past fifteen to twenty years (beginning nearly two decades after its publication). Representative examples include Dorothea Drummond Mbalia, “Tar Baby: A Reflection of Morrison’s Developed Class Consciousness,” in Toni Morrison, ed. Linden Peach (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 89–102; Julia Emberley, “A Historical Transposition: Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Frantz Fanon’s Post-Enlightenment Phantasms,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 403–31; Letitia Moffitt, “Finding the Door: Vision/Revision and Stereotype in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 12–26; and Yogita Goyal, “The Gender of Diaspora in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 393–414. See also chapter 4 in Crawford’s Dilution Anxiety, esp. 95–111.

30. Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (1981; New York: Plume, 1982), 74, 48. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

31. One irony of this description is that “natural” sponges are typically bleached from their original, light brown to a pale golden color before sale. In a kind of echoing reversal of Gideon’s assertion that Jadine’s moderately tan skin tone is only the result of weeks spent sunbathing, the text here reminds us of the artificiality and manipulability of the “natural.” This is particularly true given that the sponge shares the edge of the bathtub with “a bottle of Neutrogena Rainbath Gel”; the intrusion of this branded product name into the narrative is a reminder of the way that cultural understandings of “natural” and “artificial” are informed by capitalist consumption, products of market and value.

32. See, e.g., characterizations of Jadine in Sandra Pouchet Paquet, “The Ancestor as Foundation in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Tar Baby,” in Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism, ed. David L. Middleton (New York: Garland, 1997), 183–206, Eleanor Traylor, “The Fabulous World of Toni Morrison: Tar Baby,” in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, ed. Nellie Y. McKay (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), 146; and James Coleman, “The Quest for Wholeness in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby,” Black American Literature Forum 20, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1986): 63–73. See also Mbalia, “Tar Baby.”

33. Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 128.

34. See Goyal, “The Gender of Diaspora,” 396; Emberley, “A Historical Transposition,” 406; and Moffitt, “Finding the Door,” 24.

35. Judylyn S. Ryan, “Contested Visions/Double-Vision in Tar Baby,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 39, nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 1993): 599.

36. See Paquet, “The Ancestor as Foundation,” 201. See also Paul Mahaffey, “Rethinking Biracial Female Sexuality in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby,” Proteus: A Journal of Ideas 21, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 38–42; Mahaffey repeatedly refers to Jadine as “biracial.”

37. Granted, this reading sidesteps the more complex real-world racial and ethnic configurations that might contribute, in the post–Civil Rights era, to a “black” body’s “miscegenated” appearance—not only the hybridity that historically has operated throughout and often signaled diaspora but also the inherent multiraciality of the postmodern global scene. These real-world circumstances mean that any number of racial and ethnic encounters might produce a putatively “black” body with uncharacteristic (as in, not characteristically African) features—a point of which Morrison herself seems well aware.

38. See Nella Larsen, Passing (1929; New York: Penguin, 2003); and Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; New York: HarperCollins, 1999).

39. As Spillers notes, “under conditions of captivity, the offspring of the female does not ‘belong’ to the Mother, nor is s/he ‘related’ to the ‘owner,’ though the latter ‘possesses’ it, and in the African-American instance, often fathered it, and, as often, without whatever benefit of patrimony” (“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 269).

40. Of course, this “penetration” extends to her sexual behavior; it is no coincidence that Jadine arrives on Isle des Chevaliers straight from the arms of not one but three white European suitors (44).

41. See Lacy, Blue-Chip Black, 24–26.

42. See, e.g., Mbalia, “Tar Baby,” and Coleman, “The Quest for Wholeness.”

43. Wahneema Lubiano, “But Compared to What? Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse,” Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 275.

44. Lubiano, “But Compared to What?” 276.

45. See, e.g., Paul Gilroy’s “Spiking the Argument: Spike Lee and the Limits of Racial Community,” in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), 183–91, in which Gilroy argues that “Lee’s world is animated by a campaign against difficulty, complexity and anything else that does not fit the historic binary codes of American racial thought to which he subscribes and on which his allegories now rely: Straight and Nappy, Jiggaboos and Wannabees, . . . black and white” (186). For similar sentiments see Amiri Baraka, “Spike Lee at the Movies,” and Houston A. Baker Jr., “Spike Lee and the Commerce of Culture,” both in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 145–53, 154–76; Tera Hunter, “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World: Specters of the Old Re-newed in Afro-American Culture and Criticism,” Callaloo 38 (Winter 1989): 247–49; and Eric Lott, “Response to Trey Ellis’s ‘The New Black Aesthetic,’” Callaloo 38 (Winter 1989): 245.

46. Toni Cade Bambara, “Programming with School Daze,” in The Spike Lee Reader, ed. Paula J. Massood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 11.

47. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 6.

48. Bambara, “Programming with School Daze,” 17.

49. See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 176–77; and E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (1957; New York: Free Press, 1997), 220–21. See also Crawford, Dilution Anxiety, esp. 62–89.

50. Given how Lee portrays such queer undertones of fraternity culture, it should perhaps not surprise us that Dap and the Fellas openly deride the Gamma Phi Gammas as “fags” elsewhere in the film.

51. Cornel West, “The Paradox of the African American Rebellion,” reprinted in Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, ed. Eddie S. Glaude (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 25.

52. Lacy, Blue-Chip Black, 26.

53. School Daze, dir. Spike Lee (Columbia Pictures, 1988).

54. Lubiano, “But Compared to What?” 275.

55. In Ondine’s words, “A daughter is a woman that cares about where she come from and takes care of them that took care of her” (282). While it might be argued that Jadine is seeking something else entirely from blackness or whiteness—and the book’s final image of her depicts her on an airplane—this reading overlooks the fact that Jadine’s final journey, in the text, takes her back to Paris. The cosmopolitan escape from constraint that Jadine seeks seems to be, perhaps necessarily, located in Europe, far away not just from Son but also from any semblance of African American community.

56. See, e.g., Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips (1984; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), which depicts a black bourgeois heroine who determinedly flees blackness; see also Trey Ellis’s Platitudes (1988; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), in which the seductions of material privilege are self-evident for both of the black teenage protagonists, while blackness remains a burden to be endured or escaped.

57. See Spike Lee with Lisa Jones, Uplift the Race: The Construction of School Daze (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), on brown-skinned actress Tyra Ferrell, deliberately cast as “the darkest Gamma Ray” (85).

58. Lee and Jones, Uplift the Race, 220.

59. Derricotte, The Black Notebooks, 183.

60. “Local Yokels” scene, School Daze.

61. Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 142. See also Robin D. G. Kelley, “Kickin’ Reality, Kickin’ Ballistics: Gangsta Rap and Post-Industrial Los Angeles,” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), esp. 209–11.

62. See Margaret Thomas, “Linguistic Variation in Spike Lee’s School Daze,” College English 56, no. 8 (1994): 911–27, esp. 917–23.

63. See Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 205–10.

64. Lubiano, “But Compared to What?” 275. In “Spectacular Intimacies,” andré carrington points out that “not all modes of self-fashioning that alter the embodied experience of identity are violent” (191) and even persuasively reads “hair straightening as a disidentificatory practice” (182). See also Kobena Mercer, who makes a similar point in 1994’s Welcome to the Jungle—yet the opposition between chemically altered and “natural” hair remains a clear class trope in both Lee’s and Morrison’s narratives. Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 97–130.

65. For an intriguing reading of these visual contrasts as examples of Morrison’s use of surrealism, see Crawford, Dilution Anxiety, 101–4.

66. Lee and Jones, Uplift the Race, 156.

67. The “politically correct” quotation is in Hunter, “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World,” 248. The “sublimated public body” is a reference to Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 93.

68. Moffitt, “Finding the Door,” 24.

1. Trey Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” Callaloo 38 (Winter 1989): 234, 238.

2. See Tera Hunter “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World,” Callaloo 38 (Winter 1989): 247–49; and Eric Lott, “Response to Trey Ellis’s ‘The New Black Aesthetic,’” Callaloo 38 (Winter 1989): 244–46. See also Madhu Dubey, “Postmodernism as Post-Nationalism? Racial Representation in US Black Cultural Studies,” New Formations 45 (Winter 2001–2): 150–68, esp. 156–58.

3. Lott, “Response,” 246.

4. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 13.

5. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1734.

6. Audrey Elisa Kerr, “The Paper Bag Principle: Of the Myth and the Motion of Colorism,” Journal of American Folklore 118, no. 469 (2005): 273.

7. Note that I do not, here, intend to reinforce the stereotype that all mixed-race subjects are “light-skinned” (see Naomi Pabst, “Blackness/Mixedness: Contestations over Crossing Signs,” Cultural Critique 54 [Spring 2003]: 194); at the same time, I find Pabst’s claims around this point inconsistent. Simply to acknowledge, as she does, that some mixed-race individuals are not light-skinned, or to assert that some light-skinned elites “are offended when mistaken for having racially distinct parentage,” is not to disprove a general truth that, in her own words, “light-skinnedness and tangible black/white mixedness do often occur simultaneously and are thus overlapping categories” (194).

8. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 13.

9. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 14.

10. Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” 235.

11. Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” 235.

12. Habiba Ibrahim, Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), viii.

13. For more on this see my discussion in chapter 4 of Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), esp. 119–21.

14. Rebecca Walker, Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (New York: Riverhead, 2001), 5. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

15. For a useful and pointed analysis of these sorts of narratives of interracial promise and the way that they desexualize and disappear the “interracial sexual relationship,” see Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

16. This passage in Walker’s text resonates, perhaps deliberately, with Jadine’s anxious response to the woman in yellow in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, a woman with “skin like tar” who “made [Jadine] feel lonely in a way. Lonely and inauthentic.” Morrison, Tar Baby (1981; New York: Plume, 1982), 45, 48.

17. Lori Harrison-Kahan, “Passing for White, Passing for Jewish: Mixed Race Identity in Danzy Senna and Rebecca Walker,” MELUS 30, no. 1 (2005): 37.

18. It may be worth noting, here, that Walker directly and almost completely contradicts this point about blood ties in her subsequent memoir, Baby Love, which details her experience of (biological) motherhood.

19. Danzy Senna, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History (New York: Picador, 2009), 13. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

20. See, e.g., Brenda Boudreau, “Letting the Body Speak: ‘Becoming’ White in Caucasia,” Modern Language Studies 32, no. 1 (2002): 64; and chapter 3 of Michele Elam’s The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

21. Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk, 113.

22. Andrew P. Killick, “Music as Ethnic Marker in Film: The ‘Jewish’ Case,” in Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 186.

23. Sherry Ortner, “Identities: The Hidden Life of Class,” Journal of Anthropological Research 54, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 13.

24. Boudreau, “Letting the Body Speak,” 67.

25. Ralina L. Joseph, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 74.

26. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 20–21.

27. Senna quoted in Boudreau, “Letting the Body Speak,” 59.

28. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 7.

29. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1736, 1730, 1737.

30. Joseph, Transcending Blackness, 83.

31. Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 259; Coates, Between the World and Me, 107.

32. For a vivid representation of the contrast between the island of Jamaica’s centrality as a tourist destination for Westerners and its exploitation by Western economic and political organizations such as the IMF, see the 2001 documentary Life and Debt, dir. Stephanie Black (New Yorker Films, 2003).

33. This “punks” and “thugs” discourse, of course, returns us to Jim’s thinly veiled racism. As Charles F. Coleman Jr. notes, the word “thug,” always racially inflected, has in recent years become a regular euphemism for “nigger.” See Coleman, “‘Thug’ Is the New N-Word,” Ebony, 27 May 2015, https://www.ebony.com/news/thug-is-the-new-n-word-504/.

34. Boudreau, “Letting the Body Speak,” 62.

35. See Pabst, “Blackness/Mixedness,” 180.

36. Of course, strictly speaking, Harris’s legal argument about whiteness as property does not apply to Birdie, as one whose “blood was tainted” and “could not legally be white” (“Whiteness as Property” 1739). I still find Harris’s argument compelling as a way to think through the race and class implications of Birdie’s position.

37. Patricia J. Williams, Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 196.

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; Chicago: McClurg, 1908), 3.

2. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xiii.

3. Bianca C. Williams, The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diaspora Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 9.

4. Eve Dunbar, Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 4. Dunbar’s sense of blackness as a region is a persuasive geographical metaphor capturing the “third narrative space” (7) that midcentury writers such as Hurston and Wright used to “documen[t] and reimagin[e] a set of ‘homegrown’ experiences within a more worldly framework” (7).

5. In “No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean,” their introduction to their edited volume Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (Boston: South End Press, 2007), McKittrick and Woods write: “The dilemmas that arise when we think about space and race often take three very separate approaches (bodily, economic/historical materialist, metaphoric) that result in reducing black geographies to either geographic determinism (black bodies inherently occupying black places), the flesh (the body as the only relevant black geographic scale), or the imagination (metaphoric/creative spaces, which are not represented as concrete, everyday, or lived). Consequently race, or blackness, is not understood as socially produced and shifting but is instead conceptualized as transhistorical, essentially corporeal, or allegorical or symbolic. In this process, which might be called bio-geographic determinism, black geographies disappear—to the margins or to the realm of the unknowable” (7, emphasis added).

6. McKittrick and Woods, Black Geographies, 7.

7. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 4.

8. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 4.

9. Shay Youngblood, Black Girl in Paris (New York: Riverhead Books, 2000), 7; Reginald McKnight, He Sleeps (New York: Picador, 2001), 1. Hereafter, each will be cited parenthetically in the text.

10. See Cornel West, “The Paradox of the African American Rebellion,” in Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, ed. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 22–38.

11. Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Cold War Culturalism and African Diaspora Theory: Some Theoretical Sketches,” Souls 19, no. 2 (2017): 214. See also Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text 19, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 45–73.

12. For more on the complex history and politics of respectability in African American culture, see, e.g., Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–20; Kevin Kelly Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Evelynn Hammonds, “Towards a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic of Silence,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. J. Alexander and C. T. Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997): 93–104; or my own book, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). For an astute analysis of how black women’s intellectual thought has been both constrained and enabled in productive ways by respectability discourse, see Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

13. For more on Pentecostal worship and the resistant power of black flesh, see Ashon Crawley, Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).

14. Eden herself points to Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright as examples of this phenomenon. Popular narratives of Europe as an environment more welcoming to blacks persist even now; see, e.g., Eleanor Beardsley, “Paris Has Been a Haven for African Americans Escaping Racism,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, September 2, 2013, Paris.

15. Andrea Lee, Sarah Phillips (1984; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 15.

16. For more on the carceral aspects of urban geography, specifically Chicago, see Rashad Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

17. Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 12.

18. B. C. Williams, The Pursuit of Happiness, 92.

19. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 84, 85, 88, 89.

20. Paul Smith, “Eastwood Bound,” in Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (New York: Routledge, 1995), 77; Mark Anthony Neal, New Black Man (New York: Routledge, 2005), 21.

21. E. Frances White, “Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counterdiscourse, and African American Nationalism,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New Press, 1995), 504.

22. Arguably, this hierarchy is built into the very foundations of the discipline of anthropology; as Ruth Behar suggests, traditional anthropology was “born of the European colonial impulse to know others in order to lambast them, better manage them, or exalt them.” Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 4. See also Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes that anthropology “has a professional bias toward difference.” Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Reading,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadke (New York: Routledge, 2001), 222.

23. John L. Jackson Jr., Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 156.

24. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 90.

25. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 88.

26. Of course, this stripping of middle-class protections and the need to accept work requiring unskilled labor—e.g., work as a driver, care work, farm or factory work—is commonplace for educated immigrants to the United States, especially those from non-white countries whose credentials are not always recognized in the United States.

27. LaShawn Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 6.

28. Lee, Sarah Phillips, 6–7.

29. Deborah Willis, ed., Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 4.

30. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 4.

31. Jennifer D. Williams, “Black American Girls in Paris: Sex, Race, and Cosmopolitanism in Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips and Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris,” Contemporary Women’s Writing 9, no. 2 (2014): 247.

32. For more on the history of, in particular, black women’s labor in the United States, see Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

33. Harris, Sex Workers, 32.

34. As Jones notes, black women who worked in white American households as domestics were considered the “special prey” of the husbands and sons of the household (Labor of Love, 113). See also Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter (1984; New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1996), 101.

35. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 4.

36. Z. Z. Packer, “Geese,” Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (New York: Riverhead, 2003), 189–210.

37. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xix.

1. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; New York: Grove Press, 1967), 231. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

2. Sharon Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 4.

3. I am thinking here not only of Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), quoted above as an epigraph, or Sharon Holland’s The Erotic Life of Racism, but also works like Kara Keeling’s “Looking for M—: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15, no. 4 (2009): 565–82, which also begins with Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and his invocation of Marx’s notion of “poetry from the future” to mark the possibility for “social revolution” (565); as well as C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which also opens with a quotation from Fanon on the “problem of time” (vii). Of course, this brief list of texts concerned with black futurity and temporality deliberately sidesteps a much more vast creative and critical project collected under the rubric of Afrofuturism, a cultural aesthetic that incorporates science fiction and fantasy, magical realism, and non-Western belief systems to challenge the racial homogeneity of conventional genre fiction and explore questions of black identity and subjectivity in futuristic contexts. For critical analysis of Afrofuturism and black speculative fiction, see foundational works by Ytasha Womack, Sheree R. Thomas, andré carrington, and Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, among others. See also Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s “Speculative Poetics: Audre Lorde as Prologue for Queer Black Futurism” in The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, Futurism and the Speculative, ed. Sandra Jackson and Julie E. Moody-Freeman (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 130–45. Gumbs’s analysis of the black lesbian as vampire offers a fascinating bridge between black queer and black speculative approaches to black futurity.

4. For this argument, especially, see Paul Gilroy’s Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000). See also Debra Dickerson’s The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

5. “Not yet here” is meant to invoke José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), which begins with the words “Queerness is not yet here” (1); the “black future looks like” quotation is from Keeling, “Looking for M—,” 578. Both Muñoz and Keeling are responding to an earlier, well-known reading of queerness as against (reproductive) futurity, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), which famously makes an argument opposing (white and male) queerness to the future, represented in the figure of the child.

6. Campt, Listening to Images, 15 and 107.

7. Campt, Listening to Images, 107.

8. Campt, Listening to Images, 17.

9. Campt, Listening to Images, 17.

10. Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2004), 5.

11. Campt, Listening to Images, 17; Alexander, The Black Interior, 5.

12. Alexander, The Black Interior, 5.

13. Campt, Listening to Images, 17.

14. Percival Everett, Erasure (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 28, 2.

15. Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor (New York: Bantam Doubleday/Anchor Press, 2009).

16. For a much longer analysis of Bertrand’s sexualized, racial shame in He Sleeps, see Candice M. Jenkins, “‘A Kind of End to Blackness’: Reginald McKnight’s He Sleeps and the Body Politics of Race and Class,” in From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances, ed. Vershawn Ashanti Young and Bridget Harris Tsemo (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 261–86.

17. For a sociological discussion of the ways being “cool” circulates in black male contexts, see Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson’s foundational text, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (1992; New York: Touchstone, 1993).

18. Imani Perry, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 128.

19. Perry, More Beautiful and More Terrible, 137, 147.

20. Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 8.

21. Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 26.

22. Roland Murray, “Not Being and Blackness: Percival Everett and the Uncanny Forms of Racial Incorporation,” American Literary History 29, no. 4 (December 2017): 728, 733.

23. Murray, “Not Being and Blackness,” 734.

24. I want to thank my former MA student at Hunter College, Helen Leshinsky, for pointing out this reading of Rinehart’s name.

25. Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 7, 9.

26. Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 221, emphasis added.

27. Alexander, The Black Interior, 5.

28. Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 26.

29. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 48.

30. Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 48.

31. Alexander, The Black Interior, 7.

32. Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans Andrew Motte and N. W. Chittenden (1687; New York: Putnam, 1850), 506–7.

33. Newton, The Mathematical Principles, 507.

34. Recently, in a different context, Marcus Anthony Hunter also turns to gravity as a metaphor for racial identity, though his focus is largely on racial gravity as constraint. He writes: “The history, acts and agitation between the oppressor and the oppressed since the colonial period has [sic] participated in making race function much in the way that Einstein characterizes gravity. Much like how gravity affects matter in the natural world, in the social world race in varying degrees draws people apart and together, binds people to sidewalks, neighbourhoods and institutions of civil society” (2). Hunter, “Racial Physics or a Theory for Everything That Happened,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 8 (2017): 1174.

35. Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 227.

36. Campt, Listening to Images, 17.

37. The quotation is from Alexander, The Black Interior, 5.

1. Kevin Willmott and Marleen S. Barr, “Black ‘Science Faction’: An Interview with Kevin Willmott, Director and Writer of CSA: The Confederate States of America,” in Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory, ed. Barr (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 239, 237.

2. Frank Wilderson, “Civil Rights,” Incognegro.org (2008), retrieved from http://www.incognegro.org/afro_pessimism.html. See also Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

3. Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” In Tensions 5 (Fall/Winter 2011): 30.

4. Jared Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Special Issue: “Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness, and the Discourses of Modernity,” Rhizomes 29, no. 1 (2016): paragraph 16, https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e02.

5. Jared Sexton, “Unbearable Blackness,” Cultural Critique 90 (Spring 2015): 166.

6. Sexton, “Social Life of Social Death,” 30.

7. Dalton Anthony Jones, “Northern Hieroglyphics: Nomadic Blackness and Spatial Literacy,” Special Issue: “Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness, and the Discourses of Modernity” Rhizomes 29, no. 1 (2016): paragraph 21, https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e01.

8. Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 38.

9. Wilderson, Red, White and Black, 7, 18.

10. Sabine Broeck, “Inequality or (Social) Death,” Special Issue: “Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness and the Discourses of Modernity,” Rhizomes 29, no. 1 (2016): paragraph 15, https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e11.

11. Wilderson, Red, White and Black, 340.

12. Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism,” paragraph 8.

13. Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism,” paragraph 8. The quotation from Wagner is from Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 2.

14. Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism,” paragraph 8.

15. My reference here is to Harriet Jacobs’s hiding place, a garret under the roof of her grandmother’s house, which she described as a “loophole of retreat.” For a fascinating reading of this space as an exemplary instance of black women’s geography, see Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), ch. 2, esp. 37–44 and 59–63.

16. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 8.

17. Sharpe, In the Wake, 11.

18. Sharpe, In the Wake, 134 (see also 16); and Christina Sharpe, “Blackness, Sexuality, and Entertainment,” American Literary History 24, no. 4 (2012): 828.

19. Sharpe, In the Wake, 4.

20. Sharpe, In the Wake, 17.

21. Rizvana Bradley, “Living in the Absence of a Body: The (Sus)Stain of Black Female (W)holeness,” Special Issue: “Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness and the Discourses of Modernity,” Rhizomes 29, no. 1 (2016): paragraph 2, https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e13.

22. Bradley, “Living,” paragraph 2.

23. Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism,” paragraph 6; Sharpe, In the Wake, 76.

24. Sharpe, In the Wake, 77.

25. Erica Edwards, “What Was African American Literature? A Symposium,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 13, 2011, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-was-african-american-literature-a-symposium/#!.

26. Terrion L. Williamson, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life (New York: Fordham University Press), 9.

27. Williamson, Scandalize My Name, 15.

28. Sexton, “Social Life of Social Death,” 29; Sharpe, In the Wake, 50.

29. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 149.

30. My use of the term “post-post-soul” here is a nod to Jeffrey T. Nealon on post-postmodernism, a concept that, he suggests, “marks an intensification and mutation within postmodernism (which in its turn was of course a historical mutation and intensification of certain tendencies within modernism)” (ix). See Nealon, Post-Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

31. Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down (New York: Grove, 2007), 5. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

32. For a representative case study on the housing market collapse and disparate recovery for black homeowners, see Michael Fletcher, “A Shattered Foundation: African Americans Who Bought Homes in Prince George’s Have Watched Their Wealth Vanish,” Washington Post, January 24, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/01/24/the-american-dream-shatters-in-prince-georges-county/?utm_term=.0afc74b773dc; for more on black unemployment, see the Economic Policy Institute’s 2015 report, “The Crisis of Black Unemployment: Still Higher Than Pre-Recession Levels,” The American Prospect, April 2, 2015, https://prospect.org/article/crisis-black-unemployment-still-higher-pre-recession-levels.

33. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 14.

34. For more on this phenomenon, see the work of John Logan (“Separate and Unequal: The Neighborhood Gap for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians in Metropolitan America,” US2010 Project, https://s4.ad.brown.edu/Projects/Diversity/Data/Report/report0727.pdf) or Patrick Sharkey (“Neighborhoods and the Black-White Mobility Gap,” Economic Mobility Project, https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/reports/economic_mobility/pewsharkeyv12pdf.pdf).

35. For a very different reading of the race and class implications of this scene, see the concluding chapter of Ken Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), esp. 129–39.

36. Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 257.

37. Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 9.

38. See, again, Warren, What Was African American Literature, esp. 139.

39. Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days (2001; New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 54. Hereafter cited by page number in the text.

40. Perhaps not coincidentally, this scene recalls Toni Morrison’s character Consolata in Paradise (1997), who alienates her lover when she bites his lip and draws blood.

41. This phrasing from Whitehead seems to make passing reference to the 1964 film Nothing But a Man, which starred Abbey Lincoln and Ivan Dixon and told the story of a black railroad worker, Duff Anderson, chafing against his personal and social circumstances in a racist small town near Birmingham, Alabama—another instance of Whitehead drawing direct links between the racial fates of fictional black men across historical periods.

42. For more on this sort of spectatorship as well as the radical potentiality of representations of black suffering, see Courtney R. Baker’s Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

43. See Sexton, “Unbearable Blackness,” 168.

44. Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 34. Nyong’o’s historical analysis of Attucks is considerably more nuanced than my summary of Attucks’s story would indicate, attending as it does to Attucks’s native ancestry and reading him as “a hybrid object between red and black moving fugitively across a landscape” (41), yet Whitehead’s novel seems clearly to depend upon the more conventional understanding of Attucks as a black casualty of Revolution.

45. See Brittney Cooper on the notion that “time belongs to white people.” Cooper, “The Racial Politics of Time,” TEDWomen 2016 Talk, filmed October 2016, San Francisco.

46. For more on literary representation of these sorts of protective performances of decorum, see my book, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

47. Bumpurs, a black woman in her sixties with a history of mental illness, was shot in her apartment by NYPD officers on October 29, 1984. Her story returned to news outlets recently after an eerily similar NYPD shooting of a black woman in the Bronx, Deborah Danner. See Alan Feuer, “Fatal Police Shooting in Bronx Echoes One from 32 Years Ago,” New York Times, October 19, 2016.

48. Bradley, “Living,” paragraph 3.

49. Coates, Between the World and Me, 70.

50. Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, delivered April 3, 1968, Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters), Memphis, Tennessee, transcription, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm.

51. Cf. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

52. Coates, Between the World and Me, 70.

53. Williamson, Scandalize My Name, 16.

54. Sexton, “Social Life of Social Death,” 28; Williamson, Scandalize My Name, 15.

55. The closest the text comes to conceding this link is a moment on page 138, when a young J. is watching a filmstrip in school, a cartoon story about John Henry. An older J. thinks back to this scene, particularly the image of a huge infant John Henry, “born big, forty pounds and gifted with speech straight out the womb,” who “ate . . . food in great inhalations.” In an aside, the narrator notes, “J. wondering from the summit of the Talcott Motor Lodge, who is that little boy down there in the classroom who shares his name, and where did they get that food. He was born a slave. His parents were slaves. Where did they get all that food?” (138, emphasis added). Of course, the little boy “down there in the classroom” might simply refer to a young J. and not to the John of the cartoon—this remaining ambiguity leaves the question of J.’s name unresolved.

56. Sexton, “Social,” 29.

1. See Daniel Politi, “Starbucks CEO Apologizes for Arrest of Two Black Men Waiting in Philadelphia Store,” Slate, April 15, 2018, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/starbucks-ceo-apologizes-for-arrest-of-two-black-men-waiting-in-philadelphia-store.html.

2. See the “Visit Philadelphia” website, which describes Rittenhouse Square as such: “One of five original squares planned by city founder William Penn in the late 17th century, Rittenhouse Square is the heart of Center City’s most expensive and exclusive neighborhood. With a bevy of high-rise residences filled with top-end luxury apartments, and some of the best fine dining experiences in the city, residents can marvel at their options, while also enjoying the luxury retail shopping in the area, all of which help surrounds [sic] the handsome tree-filled park.” www.visitphilly.com/things-to-do/attractions/rittenhouse-square-park/.

3. To this litany of similar stories we might add that of a group of black women, members of an exclusive golf club, who had the police called on them in 2018 for allegedly playing the course “too slowly,” a determination that seemed entirely dependent upon the opinion of the group of white men following them in play (the same group that called law enforcement). See Christina Caron, “5 Black Women Were Told to Golf Faster. Then the Club Called the Police,” New York Times, April 25, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/black-women-golfers-york.html.

4. Claudia Rankine, interview by Rich Fahle, “Claudia Rankine on Citizen: An American Lyric—2015 L.A. Times Festival of Books,” Detroit Public TV, May 18, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=upCFbREUvtk.

5. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014), 28. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

6. While a full analysis of Lawrence’s relationship with Tasha is beyond the scope of our discussion here, it is worth noting that on the show Tasha is repeatedly marked, through patterns of speech and styling, as working-class rather than, like Issa and Molly, bourgeois. The end of Lawrence and Tasha’s relationship is itself a highly classed moment, as an uncomfortable Lawrence surveys the down-home (read, “ratchet”) goings-on at Tasha’s family barbecue and decides, seemingly on the spot, to abandon it, and her, in favor of a party with his largely white coworkers.

7. “I don’t want the stench of the current administration on this show. . . . I don’t want people to look back and be like: ‘Oh, this was a Trump show.’ I want them to look back and say Insecure was an Obama show. Because it is: Obama enabled this show.” Jane Mulkerrins, “Issa Rae: ‘So Much of the Media Presents Blackness as Fierce and Flawless. I’m Not,’” The Guardian, August 5, 2017, www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/05/issa-rae-media-presents-blackness-fierce-flawless-insecure.

8. “Hella LA,” Insecure, season two, episode four, written by Laura Kittrell, Christopher Oscar Peña, Issa Rae, Natasha Rothwell, and Larry Wilmore, directed by Prentice Penny, HBO, August 13, 2017.

9. See Kurt Chirbas, Erik Ortiz, and Corky Siemaszko, “Baltimore County Police Fatally Shoot Korryn Gaines, 23, Wound 5-Year-Old, Son,” NBC News.com, August 2, 2016, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/baltimore-county-police-fatally-shoot-korryn-gaines-boy-5-hurt-n621461; “Experts Point to Brain Injury in N Carolina Police Shooting,” Chicago Tribune, October 4, 2016, www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-keith-lamont-scott-brain-injury-20161004-story.html; Max Blau, Jason Morris, and Catherine E. Shoichet, “Tulsa Police Shooting Investigated by Justice Department,” CNN.com, May 18, 2017, www.cnn.com/2016/09/20/us/oklahoma-tulsa-police-shooting/index.html; Jamiel Lynch and Darran Simon, “Former Texas Officer Indicted for Murder in Death of Jordan Edwards,” CNN.com, July 17, 2017, www.cnn.com/2017/07/17/us/texas-cop-indicted-jordan-edwards-death/index.html.

10. Based on facial features, one of the women appears to be of Asian descent but has long, dyed-blonde hair and fair skin; this, along with her avid participation in fetishizing black men’s bodies, makes it reasonable to read her as white passing or white complicit.

11. “After the Winter,” Queen Sugar, season two, written by Monica Macer, Davita Scarlett, Ava DuVernay, directed by Kat Candler, OWN, June 20, 2017.

12. “Freedom’s Plow,” Queen Sugar, season two, written by Anthony Sparks, Davita Scarlett, Ava DuVernay, directed by Amanda Marsalis, OWN, August 2, 2017.

13. See Gerry Everding, “Police Kill Unarmed Blacks More Often, Especially When They Are Women, Study Finds,” The Source, Washington University in St. Louis, February 6, 2018, https://source.wustl.edu/2018/02/police-kill-unarmed-blacks-often-especially-women-study-finds/; see also Odis Johnson Jr., Keon Gilbert, and Habiba Ibrahim, “Race, Gender, and the Contexts of Unarmed Fatal Interactions with Police,” Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, February 2018, https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.wustl.edu/dist/b/1205/files/2018/02/Race-Gender-and-Unarmed-1y9md6e.pdf.

14. Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 5.

15. Notably, the video humanizes the officer as well, highlighting the way he operates as unwilling cog and weapon in a larger machine of white supremacy.

16. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 21.

17. Reginald McKnight, He Sleeps (New York: Picador, 2001), 155.