Step right up! Examine the features. Light enough to be palatable, dark enough to be exotic. Skin somewhere between coffee and cream… they used to auction people this way, by shade, by texture, by blood. And somehow, centuries later, we still are asked: what are you?
“They bred us like cattle, then blamed us for being wild” (Césaire, A 2000). I was asked once what I called myself. I said… well, Black? He said, but you are mixed. That is when I realised, the breeding culture never ended. It just changed its language.
Slaves were treated as livestock but nothing more. Good teeth, strong arms, broad shoulders. Terms like “half caste” and “mulatto” were not neutral. They were created to measure your proximity to whiteness. You are nothing more than your skin or bloodline. This obsession with “purity” turned people into categories, not individuals. You are cattle. Plump, sweet and light. A delicious meal to be conquered, consumed, and diminished to nothing.
Which is funny when you think about it. Race was never about biology; it was about control, a thirst for power. As Stuart Hall writes “Race is not a biological category… it is a cultural category which has been constructed as if it were biological” (Hall 1997). The illusion that was created, that breeding logic… still decides who belongs.
Being told, “you’re not really Black” is the modern echo of that same obsession with purity. My mother is a light skinned Angolan who grew up being called “mulata,” while my father, an African American mixed man, was simply “just Black.” There are lines and waves to blackness, colours, and textures too. To be both questioned and claimed. Diminished to a single line of “but you have to be mixed with something else, right?”
I have learned to justify my belonging through struggle, as if identity is something to be earned. The questions do not come from only outside; it lingers within our own communities too. Colourism, shadeism, the quiet hierarchies we inherited. The silent whispers that proximity to whiteness makes you special but also makes you suspicious.
Colonialism did not just enslave the body; it ranked them. Lighter skin was rewarded, darker skin punished. Beauty, status, and freedom were all measured against the same pale yardstick. Those hierarchies did not disappear, they rebranded. You see that, in media, in desirability, in who gets to be “soft” or “beautiful.” Questions like “light skin or darkskin.” They shape how we see others, and the way we see ourselves. The praise for “being a different kind of Black” but condemned for being too outspoken. Just enough to be labelled “an angry black woman.”
Calling myself Black is not denying the mixture in my blood, it is about claiming the lineage, the struggle, and the community that shaped me. Blackness is not a fraction or a formula; it is a living inheritance, a language of survival. Being mixed does not dilute it. It stretches it, widens it, makes it harder to define but impossible to erase. Because history never asked for proof. The strange fruit that hung from Southern trees was not measured by shade or bloodline. Their blackness was not debated or questioned. Not even with the “one drop rule.” It was punished. And still, it endures, unmeasured, unqualified, and wholly alive. Blackness has never needed permission to exist.
Bibliography:
Césaire, A. (2000) Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by J. Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Hall, S. (1997) ‘Race, the Floating Signifier’, in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, pp. 257–263.
Arika Heaven