So lots of folk—mostly non-black—say Obama’s not black, he’s biracial, multiracial, black-and-white, anything but just black. Because his mother was white. But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass had white fathers. Imagine them saying they were not black.
Imagine Obama, skin the color of a toasted almond, hair kinky, saying to a census worker—I’m kind of white. Sure you are, she’ll say. Many American Blacks have a white person in their ancestry, because white slave owners liked to go a-raping in the slave quarters at night. But if you come out looking dark, that’s it. (So if you are that blond, blue-eyed woman who says “My grandfather was Native American and I get discrimination too” when black folk are talking about shit, please stop it already.) In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you. Barack Obama, looking as he does, would have had to sit in the back of the bus fifty years ago. If a random black guy commits a crime today, Barack Obama could be stopped and questioned for fitting the profile. And what would that profile be? “Black Man.”
CHAPTER 38
Blaine did not like Boubacar, and perhaps this mattered or perhaps it did not matter in the story of their fight, but Blaine did not like Boubacar and her day began with visiting Boubacar’s class. She and Blaine had met Boubacar at a university-hosted dinner party in his honor, a sable-skinned Senegalese professor who had just moved to the U.S. to teach at Yale. He was blistering in his intelligence and blistering in his self-regard. He sat at the head of the table, drinking red wine and talking drily of French presidents whom he had met, of the French universities that had offered him jobs.
“I came to America because I want to choose my own master,” he said. “If I must have a master, then better America than France. But I will never eat a cookie or go to McDonald’s. How barbaric!”
Ifemelu was charmed and amused by him. She liked his accent, his English drenched in Wolof and French.
“I thought he was great,” she told Blaine later.
“It’s interesting how he says ordinary things and thinks they are pretty deep,” Blaine said.
“He has a bit of an ego, but so did everyone at that table,” Ifemelu said. “Aren’t you Yale people supposed to, before you get hired?”
Blaine did not laugh, as he ordinarily would have. She sensed, in his reaction, a territorial dislike that was foreign to his nature; it surprised her. He would put on a bad French accent and mimic Boubacar. “ ‘Francophone Africans break for coffee, Anglophone Africans break for tea. It is impossible to get real café au lait in this country!’ ”
Perhaps he resented how easily she had drifted to Boubacar that day, after desserts were served, as though to a person who spoke the same silent language as she did. She had teased Boubacar about Francophone Africans, how battered their minds were by the French and how thin-skinned they had become, too aware of European slights, and yet too enamored of Europeanness. Boubacar laughed, a familial laugh; he would not laugh like that with an American, he would be cutting if an American dared say the same thing. Perhaps Blaine resented this mutuality, something primally African from which he felt excluded. But her feelings for Boubacar were fraternal, free of desire. They met often for tea in Atticus Bookstore and talked—or she listened since he did most of the talking—about West African politics and family and home and she left, always, with the feeling of having been fortified.
BY THE TIME BOUBACAR told her about the new humanities fellowship at Princeton, she had begun to gaze at her past. A restlessness had taken hold of her. Her doubts about her blog had grown.
“You must apply. It would be perfect for you,” he said.
“I’m not an academic. I don’t even have a graduate degree.”
“The current fellow is a jazz musician, very brilliant, but he has only a high school diploma. They want people who are doing new things, pushing boundaries. You must apply, and please use me as a reference. We need to get into these places, you know. It is the only way to change the conversation.”
She was touched, sitting across from him in a café and feeling between them the warm affinities of something shared.
Boubacar had often invited her to visit his class, a seminar on contemporary African issues. “You might find something to blog about,” he said. And so, on the day that began the story of her fight with Blaine, she visited Boubacar’s class. She sat at the back, by the window. Outside, the leaves were falling from grand old trees, people with scarf-bundled necks hurried along the sidewalk holding paper cups, the women, particularly the Asian women, pretty in slender skirts and high-heeled boots. Boubacar’s students all had laptops open in front of them, the screens bright with e-mail pages, Google searches, celebrity photos. From time to time they would open a Word file and type a few words from Boubacar. Their jackets were hung behind their chairs and their body language, slouching, slightly impatient, said this: We already know the answers. After class they would go to the café in the library and buy a sandwich with zhou from North Africa, or a curry from India, and on their way to another class, a student group would give them condoms and lollipops, and in the evening they would attend tea in a master’s house where a Latin American president or a Nobel laureate would answer their questions as though they mattered.
“Your students were all browsing the Internet,” she told Boubacar as they walked back to his office.
“They do not doubt their presence here, these students. They believe they should be here, they have earned it and thay are paying for it. Au fond, they have bought us all. It is the key to America’s greatness, this hubris,” Boubacar said, a black felt beret on his head, his hands sunk into his jacket pockets. “That is why they do not understand that they should be grateful to have me stand before them.”
They had just arrived at his office when there was a knock on the half-open door.
“Come in,” Boubacar said.
Kavanagh came in. Ifemelu had met him a few times, an assistant professor of history who had lived in Congo as a child. He was curly-haired and foul-humored, and seemed better suited for covering dangerous wars in far-flung countries than for teaching history to undergraduates. He stood at the door and told Boubacar that he was leaving on a sabbatical and the department was ordering sandwiches the next day as a going-away lunch for him, and he had been told they were fancy sandwiches with such things as alfalfa sprouts.
“If I am bored enough, I will stop by,” Boubacar said.
“You should come,?
?? Kavanagh said to Ifemelu. “Really.”
“I’ll come,” she said. “Free lunch is always a good idea.”
As she left Boubacar’s office, Blaine sent her a text: Did you hear about Mr. White at the library?
Her first thought was that Mr. White had died; she did not feel any great sadness, and for this she felt guilty. Mr. White was a security guard at the library who sat at the exit and checked the back flap of each book, a rheumy-eyed man with skin so dark it had an undertone of blueberries. She was so used to seeing him seated, a face and a torso, that the first time she saw him walking, his gait saddened her: his shoulders stooped, as though burdened by lingering losses. Blaine had befriended him years ago, and sometimes during his break, Blaine would stand outside talking to him. “He’s a history book,” Blaine told her. She had met Mr. White a few times. “Does she have a sister?” Mr. White would ask Blaine, gesturing to her. Or he would say “You look tired, my man. Somebody keep you up late?” in a way Ifemelu thought inappropriate. Whenever they shook hands, Mr. White squeezed her fingers, a gesture thick with suggestion, and she would pull her hand free and avoid his eyes until they left. There was, in that handshake, a claiming, a leering, and for this she had always harbored a small dislike, but she had never told Blaine because she was also sorry about her dislike. Mr. White was, after all, an old black man beaten down by life and she wished she could overlook the liberties he took.
“Funny how I’ve never heard you speak Ebonics before,” she told Blaine, the first time she heard him talking to Mr. White. His syntax was different, his cadences more rhythmic.
“I guess I’ve become too used to my White People Are Watching Us voice,” he said. “And you know, younger black folk don’t really do code switching anymore. The middle-class kids can’t speak Ebonics and the inner-city kids speak only Ebonics and they don’t have the fluidity that my generation has.”