one and the same

I feel like I’m too old to still be playing the role of “baby’s first negro.”

This is something I often joke to myself about. Growing up, I was, for many of my peers, the first real experience of a Black person they’d had. Not a character on TV or someone they’ve walked by in the street, but actual up close dealings with someone with personality, moods, the lot. You can’t help but feel it, even as a child. You feel the weight of being a preview, a representative for a whole people. You have the burden of educating them on key topics (and sometimes miseducating them for your own entertainment). You know that how you behave can colour their idea of what “Black” means for years to come. You naively assume that as you get older, things will change.

But 20 years on, I still find myself being an introductory course into Blackness for many. It’s getting tiring. Also, more importantly, even on my best days, I think I’m badly cast for the part. Autistic, dyslexic, too Nigerian for the Brits, too British for the Nigerians. Didn’t grow up close enough to London to embody “Black British” subculture either. How am I meant to represent a whole race of people? How is anyone?

Race is a strange thing. It’s kinda just made up. It has no biological basis, in fact, there is more genetic variation within racial groups than there is between them. While many have been led to believe it’s a natural unification, it’s more of an externally imposed grouping that wasn’t meant to unite people, but rather differentiate them from the rest of the population. Racial classification isn’t even consistent. In America, the “one-drop” rule made it so that a person with an ounce of Black ancestry is by default considered Black. While in African nations where Blackness is the norm, people we’d class as mixed race are called “white”.

With racial classification, you take something genuinely diverse and flatten it into a single shape. And “Black British” is already a flattening on top of a flattening, a word doing the work that “Jamaican” or “Nigerian” or “Somali” or “Ghanaian” etc. used to do on their own, each with its own history, its own relationship to this country, its own reasons for being here at all. And in doing this, these people become united in two things: a collective sense of otherness and the burden of representation.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. A racial monolith imposed upon a people doesn’t just misdescribe them, it makes them vulnerable in a very specific, very useful way. One person’s conduct becomes everyone’s evidence. I’ve watched this cut in both directions. Get something wrong, publicly, and it isn’t your failure, it’s a data point about “people like you.” But get something right, and you don’t get to just be excellent either, you become a symbol, which comes with its own quieter punishment, the suspicion that you’ve sold out, gotten soft, forgotten where you’re from. Fail and you indict the group. Succeed and you’re expected to carry it. Either way, you were never just allowed to be one person having one life.

I didn’t understand how far that could go, how literally someone could be flattened into a symbol and then destroyed for what the symbol supposedly proved, until I saw it happen to Jason Arday.

Arday was a sociology professor at Cambridge, the youngest Black professor at the historic institution. He was a purported tale of triumph, having grown up dyslexic and autistic, unable to read or write until he was a teenager, yet against all odds rose to academic acclaim. Then, this year, questions arose about his academic and athletic credentials, inconsistencies that some of his own Black peers in academia had apparently noticed and quietly discussed for a while before anything went public. He resigned. An investigation was ongoing. And then, before any of it had properly been resolved, he was found dead at home. Forty-one years old.

His tragic passing wasn’t an admission of guilt, but rather a failing of the systems around him. According to his family, the misinformation and harassment had grown overwhelming, he’d been shut inside his own home for days, afraid to leave it. The media frenzy was wildly disproportionate to the alleged misdoings themselves. And quickly he was cast as the pawn in a wider narrative push. The questions about his work stopped being questions about his work almost immediately. They became, instead, a referendum on whether Black academics generally deserved the positions they held, whether diversity hiring had let someone unqualified slip through, whether this was, at last, the proof everyone had apparently been waiting for.

I want to be careful here, because this isn’t about relitigating what he did or didn’t do, that isn’t the point. The point is what happened to the idea of him the moment his name became attached to a controversy. He stopped being one man with one set of allegations against him and was cast, almost instantly, as a stand-in for an entire argument about whether people like us belong in rooms like that at all. I’d spent my own life feeling the low-grade weight of that equation. Watching it play out on him, at that scale, with those stakes, was the first time I understood what it looks like when the equation gets pushed all the way to its worst possible outcome.

I think about my little joke again, too old to be baby’s first negro. It doesn’t quite hit the same. It was funny because it was survivable, a quiet observation you could brush off with a raised eyebrow and get on with your day. But then I look to Arday and see his treatment as Cambridge’s first negro, and see the direct line from joke to tragedy. The same mechanism is present in both. I’ve been cast in a role I never auditioned for since I was old enough to notice people watching me. He was cast in it too, until the volume got turned up high enough to kill him.

What I actually want is smaller than everything above probably makes it sound. I don’t want a monument. I don’t want any of us to be evidence for anybody’s argument, in either direction. Not me. Not Arday. Not whoever’s next. I want the version of personhood white people have never had to fight for extended to every Black person, every minority, stuck playing a part they never auditioned for: the option to be unremarkable, or badly behaved, or brilliant, entirely on your own account, without it colouring in anyone else’s idea of what an entire people are capable of. I want us to be allowed to fail without indicting each other, and to succeed without being burdened with the pressure of carrying everyone else up behind us.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s coming any time soon.