It Is That Deep: You Can’t Borrow Blackness

“You know I got a Black woman trapped inside me!” says the white gay male character with an overtly-racialized AAVE — African American vernacular English —  accent in the referenced “Comedy Central” skit. 

It lands like a joke — outrageous enough to laugh at, vague enough to ignore. 

However, unlike this white gay man, I cannot turn off my Blackness. 

Often, these statements and affectations when touted by non-Black English speakers rely on the idea of Blackness being accessible without the consequences of actually being Black.

Former basketball player Jalen Rose acknowledged this phenomenon when he claimed that America loves Black culture more than they love Black people. 

From the way Black queer people perform to the way that Black queer people talk — all of it is later consumed and co-opted as Queer culture by the same community who praises whiteness. 

In her work of literary criticism “Playing in the Dark,” Toni Morrison states that whiteness as a racial category functions as something both normal and invisible — shaping our perceptions of knowledge, identity and agency.

Whiteness as an invisible norm isn’t limited to cisgender and heterosexual spaces. Racist rhetoric has an age-old history within queer spaces.

Queer scholars Roderick Ferguson, Jose Muñoz and Jane Ward introduced how “white normativity,” defined by Ward as cultural norms which make whiteness appear normal, invade identity groups who want more equality and legal protections.

Namely, when marginalized communities want equality, it’s presumed the aforementioned community must take on white normativity, erasing any ethnic and racial diversity within its population.

Professor Heather Sykes emphasizes how the power of whiteness persists within the queer community due to a lack of understanding of “how gay, lesbian, and queer subjects or politics produce their own limited perceptions and normative exclusions.”

Despite Black queer people’s role in shaping queer culture and media, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight remains the clearest example of how rarely that work is recognized at the highest levels of mainstream acclaim.

Black queer people have played a large role in perfecting, curating and laying the foundations for queer culture, media and theory — The Color Purple, Romance in Marseille and Audre Lorde being a few examples.

However, Moonlight was the first and last time Black queer media reached an extraordinary level of acclaim in mainstream media. 

In a blog post made by Carolyn Wysinger, they recounted how, when Moonlight won an Oscar for Best Picture, Black students shared how the characters within the film were the first time they saw queer people that looked like them. 

“They weren’t saying this was the first time they had seen Black gay people on TV before,” Wysinger wrote. “They were saying that this was the first time they saw characters that looked like their family members or friends. Men who hung out on corners and in the liquor stores in their neighborhood.”

Yet, Black queer people haven’t been in critically-acclaimed media since — and it’s been a decade.

Moonlight was treated as proof progress had been made, when in reality, it exposed how narrow the conditions for Black queer recognition still are. 

Heartstopper, Yellowjackets and Heated Rivalry have been established as the most popular queer television shows in the last few years — in all of those shows combined, only three Black queer characters exist. 

Conversely, as much as whiteness is an invisible norm, so is the idea of a “normal,” or heterosexual relationship.

In her work “The Twilight of Equality,” sociocultural analyst Lisa Duggan expands on this with the concept of homonormativity as the convergence of queer identity with normative ideals associated with heterosexuality. 

Duggan emphasizes how homonormativity puts queer people into a world where they feel they must position themselves as being the same as heterosexuals, excluding queer people who seek to challenge oppressive structures with unconventional relationships or expression.

Most notably, Duggan asserts homonormativity upholds neoliberalism, a political philosophy emphasizing personal responsibility and autonomy through freedom of choice. 

Neoliberalism extends to relational, economic and sexual structures — structures often responsible for the further oppression of black and brown communities. 

Although neoliberalism was established as an economic project, the convergence of neoliberalism with color blindness propelled anachronistic narratives that if Black people simply tried hard enough, they could gain the same socioeconomic status as their white peers.

Whiteness and homonormativity work in tandem to define which queer lives are legible, marketable and worthy of advocacy — and which are rendered excessive, deviant or disposable. 

Yet, Black queer people are not absent from queer history or culture — they are foundational to it.