Yep. Now that you mention it, I have never really seen a serious context, i.e., one that is not bozos on social media, hotep-adjacent YouTube channels, and obscure Substack articles smearing shit all over the wall, subscribe to this staunch view of race essentialism that some Black people seem to be obsessed with.

I especially find it such a headscratcher that so many Black Americans, of all people, want to play the racial purity game when that has done so much violence to them (as it is the master’s tools) but also, by that very scientific racist framework, Black Americans certainly aren’t “pure.” Black Americans are a very “racially mixed” group of people, and that plays a part into why biracial people still get treated as nothing but Black.

There really is no way to tell if a person is “biracial” just by looking at them, and this especially rings true for Black Americans because this whole phenotype I mentioned of light skin, curly hair, and racial ambiguity? Many self-proclaimed “monoracial” Black Americans who’d say they have “four Black grandparents” have this very fucking look.

However, as I (and many others) are an example of, being “biracial” doesn’t even guarantee ambiguity. I will never forget this time I saw these goofy Black race essentialists literally deny the parentage of Dennis Schröder simply because they are unable to fathom that a biracial person can look like exactly like that.

These fools were literally saying shit like, “The source that says he has a white father must’ve gotten it wrong! That must be an error!” When their narrow view that greatly distorts how genetics and phenotypical variations actually work is starting to see contradictions, it seems like their gut instinct is to think that these contradictions they’re seeing are just the product of misinformation instead of being like, “Damn, maybe I was way more misunderstood about this than I thought.” (many such cases)

Also, something that confuses me is that some of these people are sometimes so desperate to not look like race essentialists that they try to nebulously claim what, on the surface, seems like a social rather than genetic reason for rejecting biracial people from Blackness, e.g., “Biracial people have totally different experiences than Black people!”

That whole thing about “experience” is so meaningless to throw out. One of my close friends was born to two Afro-Haitian parents but got adopted by a white family at such a young age that she didn’t know her parents and really had a hard time connecting with her Blackness until adulthood. Is she “not Black” by this logic?

This is also a very US-centric thing to say, too, because what they really mean is “my myopic idea of what constitutes a ‘true’ Black American experience.”

With this being said mostly by socially conservative types, of course, it lacks intersectionality because you know what else greatly influences the kind of “Black” experience you have? Whether you are queer or cishet, whether you are neurodivergent or neurotypical, whether you are Muslim or Christian, whether you are poor or wealthy. But, of course, they’d never acknowledge this because the validation of their shaky ideas requires them to oversimplify things and throw out useless platitudes that don’t actually pertain to a dialectical understanding of race.

The cringe I feel at seeing “Biracial is biracial, and Black is Black. It’s just basic biology!” type comments.