IS YOU IS, OR IS YOU AIN’T? (THE ANSWER
BECOMES A SET OF FURTHER QUESTIONS)
What are you? you have asked. You are either a male student whom I know but do not teach and whose parents avoid racial conversation at the dinner table, or a woman in a Houston bar who has run her fingers through my dreads without asking permission. Whoever you happen to be, please clarify your question: are you asking in the existential or the racial sense? My knee-jerk existential answer is: I am a human. I am a human constituted of the anatomical – emotional – physiological – historical – genetic – cultural – psychological – social complexity of our species. This human status