The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

by Jesmyn Ward

Black people are constantly identifying and recognizing those who look like secret black folks—many light-skinned people I know get identified as white by white people, but we know they’re black. (This isn’t passing, btw.) Most look like one of my aunties. Knowing they are black, it is hard to see them another way. It’s one of the advantages of my folks being from Louisiana—there’s lots of folks who don’t “look black” but are (which of course should make us stop and reevaluate what “looking black” is). Because of the one-drop rule, though begun as a controlling race law, black people themselves adapted and even invented and accepted a broader blackness. In general this has made black people—I am speaking for every single black person without exception here, of course—wary yet accepting.