Leoni Descartes

“So, I reject the capitalization of ‘black’. When, out of a lack of anything more suitable, we are driven to use terms that should be contested – terms that are, in the words of Stuart Hall, ‘under erasure’ – we should be seeking to destabilize them. It’s the reason that throughout this book I frequently place inverted commas around ‘black’ and ‘white’, intentionally disrupting the comfort with which we rely on that terminology. It’s for this same reason that I flinch when I hear the term ‘mixed race’, that most pernicious of racial classifications. While I completely understand why some people use the phrase to describe themselves (there are few satisfactory alternatives), any argument that insists that someone must use a term that exists to reinforce the ‘truth’ status of a system that is chaotic, nonsensical and violent, a term that further perpetuates the idea that race is a biological reality, is really not the neutral, commonsense position it might claim to be.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition