I sensed that he needed to believe I was light-skinned to feel right dating me. For all his talk of Black love between Black bodies, he liked me. He liked girls that looked like me: Desis, Arabs, Blasians, and other mixed chicks who were pigmented enough to be lassoed into a broad category of Blackness, if he chose to, if he named them queens before they could name themselves, dark enough not to feel like an outright betrayal of his people or his politics or his self.
