Tower of Power once said that hipness is what it is - but sometimes it is what it ain’t. Substitute ‘blackness’ for ‘hipness’ (and there’s a certain extent to which I think that was kinda the unstated point in the first place), and you got somethin. I ain’t gon’ lie, I’m always kinda surprised when I hear somebody espouse some notion of values-based Blackness - ‘if you ain’t/don’t/ [insert favorite item here], you ain’t really Black.’ I mean, I jokingly do it too. Just the other day, I was ribbing a friend of mine because she went to an HBCU and doesn’t play spades. I was all like, “You do like chicken and corn bread, don’t you?” But that’s nothing, because everybody at the table knew I wasn’t the least bit serious. There are some people who make that type of value judgment and mean it. I can’t quite understand that way of thinking, though. Personally, I think Blackness is existential. I mean that in both psychological terms as well as in a more ‘playing-with-the-word-exist’ way. Basically, my premise is that whatever Blackness is, it’s not something that can be measured and defined in the way that we’re used to talking about it. There is no ’standard’ to apply, no way to measure the some degree of Blackness. It is what it is. And it is what it ain’t.

What makes existential Blackness hard for some people to see is that they’re not really used to seeing Blackness as an entity unto itself; they’re used to seeing it as the contrast to whiteness. Obviously, if you use whitness to measure Blackness, the more something seems to be similar to what white people do, the less Black it is. Only thing is, that’s a flawed concept. If Blackness is existential, as I think it is, then it’s not measurable by anything other than itself. You can’t look at white to tell what Black is. Hence, while I know what somebody means when they say “talking white,” that phrase as a reflection (rejection?) of a person’s Blackness holds no meaning. (In a way, it’s like the term “Uncle Tom.” Yeah, I know what people mean when they use that term, but I don’t get how that literary figure came to represent handkerchief-headed obsequiousness. Tom died to ensure the freedom of the sistren. If that ain’t militant, I don’t know what is.) Really, the whole concept of “acting white” in general is antithetical to the idea of self-defined Blackness.

Now in saying all that, I can’t act like there aren’t some cats who I think might be happier if they weren’t Black. Obviously there’s no real way to know, so it’s just me projecting my logic onto their actions, which is a no-no. Nevertheless, when I hear Peterson or Connerly, or somebody who’s Black but uses ‘they’ when referring to Black people, my first inclination is to cast some aspersion on their Blackness. But I hafta check myself. Cuz as much as Blackness is what it is, it sometimes is what it ain’t.