from a place of conscious Blackness, a latter-day Négritude, I would answer, My momma’s just as black as your momma (which may or may not be entirely true) to create an authenticity that would, with any luck, bind me to you and evolve into a sense of belonging such that I’d have some soft place to rest my head in this dirt-hard, fractured little America of ours. This scenario is not to be though—whoever you are, you most decidedly do not speak from a place of conscious Blackness. Of course, I could try my most honest answer: in the history of recorded ideas and migrating peoples, no one