This is a particular derangement of the Right, and we saw it mobilized against Obama, too—this idea that he wasn't "really" African-American b/c he's not descended from enslaved ppl, and not "really" Black, either. https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/1293361438015336449

Funny that the gatekeeping by white people only comes up when there might actually be a political advantage to a Black person to be an ADOS.

By which I mean: What does this sort of white man call a woman of mixed Jamaican and Indian heritage on an everyday basis?

The same thing he calls an American descendant of enslaved people, or for that matter a Black Englishman descended from economic migrants.

I'll give you a hint: It's a short word. Six letters. Starts with an N.

They're all n______s to him until it looks like one of them might unite Black people behind him or her; then suddenly he's a fucking hotep, parsing who actually counts as "authentically" Black.

What's actually hilarious about this is that Black people themselves have, by and large, let the term "African-American" fall by the wayside, presumably in recognition that the struggles of Black people worldwide are more similar than they are different, whatever their ancestry.

Solidarity, in other words. And nothing terrifies hegemony more than solidarity.

And so hegemony reaches for the language of "identity politics"—its distorted understanding of idpol, anyway—to try to break solidarity.

But because hegemony does not actually understand or value the concerns of Black people, it ends up beclowning itself.

I mean, it's not *my* lane, either. I'm not Black, and I have no say in who "counts" as Black. (Not that I would even want such a thing.)

But although I'm hearing a lot of voices on the Black Left articulating some legitimate concerns about Kamala Harris, "She's not *authentically* Black!" is not one of the concerns I'm hearing.

And in this thread, Jamelle Bouie lays it out with more authority and smarts than I ever could (and lays a smackdown on Thomas Chatterton Williams's disingenuous posing, as a bonus): https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1293546088243376128