Put a racially ambiguous Black person in the public eye Kamala, Meghan, Barack… Have them declare themselves Black. Count down the minutes before the world erupts into outrage, distress and suspicion. People scream their confusion and doubt, accusing the figure of lying about who they really are. It makes for good TV.
His staged bewilderment implying that Ms. Harris was practicing some sort of sinister racial sorcery felt wild for 2024, when mixed-race people are everywhere, visually overrepresented in Target commercials and Kardashian family reunions.
Yet even in the midst of our fetishization, a stubborn strain of mulatto-phobia remains widespread. And no matter what answer we give to the ubiquitous question What are you? someone, somewhere, will accuse us of lying; of being a grifter trying to impersonate another race, a more real race.
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