Article begins
On June 4, 2020, comedian Godfrey C. Danchimah, a US-born child of Nigerian immigrants known professionally as Godfrey, was featured on VladTV. The popular YouTube channel, with over 6.2 million subscribers, is hosted by DJ Vlad. During part of the interview, Godfrey jokes about Dominican and Puerto Rican people who appear to him as Black but deny being Black. Godfrey’s shtick is voice impersonation, so in the interview, he enacts a conversation between himself and himself as a Dominican person with a strong Dominican Spanish accent. The conversation goes back and forth with Godfrey insisting that the Dominican is Black and the Dominican insisting that he is not Black. As Godfrey personifies the Dominican caricature, he mimics salsa dancing while loudly rejecting any argument that he is Black. “Be looking just like me… having the same hair… He’s like it’s not the same… It’s not the same Papi, it’s not the same. They be trying to salsa that shit off…” (8:28-8:36). Last year, Godfrey reposted a clip from this interview on Instagram titled, “When I hear Latin people deny their African Ancestry” alongside a video tracking slave ship movements from Africa into the Americas between 1785 and 1866 (Figure 1). The post with hashtags #Latin, #Africans, and #Comedy frames the moment as straightforward proof of these ethnicities denying their Blackness, ultimately reducing a complicated set of racial histories and identities.
While viewing Godfrey, the authors had different impressions of his post.
RNDLR: When I first heard the “Me no Black, Me Dominican” meme, I chuckled. It was a joke I heard growing up my entire life. As a first-generation Dominican American from Massachusetts, I grew up in a vibrant community with folks from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Cape Verde and Nigeria. But after reading the comments, my feelings began to shift. On one hand, people who commented claimed that Dominicans “hate their blackness” and that “they’re just N-words who speak Spanish.” On the other hand, others defended the statement by pointing to the tri-ancestry of the Dominican Republic and other Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands, fueling anti-Black rhetoric that often ignores the lived experiences of Afro-Latinx communities. I found myself reflecting on people in my own life, their pride in being both Black and Dominican, and how they do not fit within limited understandings of Blackness.
JBT: Putting aside Godfrey’s obvious comedic talent for voice impersonations, both the content and the delivery of the post, “Me no Black, me Dominican,” left me feeling a bit disappointed and unsettled. As the offspring of Trinidadian migrants to the United States, I grew up with a very strong sense of self and pride in my Afro-Caribbean heritage. On some level, it was hurtful to see Godfrey joke about people denying their African ancestry, yet simultaneously trying to assert belonging to a community that acknowledges (however narrowly) having African ancestral roots, e.g., tri-hybrid ancestry. Moreover, for me, the way Godfrey played up a stereotype by saying, “They be trying to salsa that shit off,” crossed from “laughing with” to “laughing at” Latin American music and aesthetic traditions. However, based on my experience conducting fieldwork across multiple island nations in the Anglophone and Hispanic Caribbean, the most unsettling aspect of the post was recognizing that it might contain an element of truth.
Godfrey’s skit highlights the dominant narrative existing in United States popular media about Blackness. This narrative, derived from the “one drop” rule of hypodescent, holds that people belong to the “lowest” racial class/caste based on their parentage. In other words, hypodescent means that people who have, or are believed to have, any sub-Saharan African parentage are Black.
Despite the historic dominance of hypodescent within the United States, adherence to this concept is neither universal nor without exception, and scholars have increasingly documented challenges to the “one-drop-rule” that complicate who and how people of recent sub-Saharan African descent identify as Black. For instance, experimental psychologists Young and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 106 experiments derived from 55 published studies to investigate categorizations associated with hypodescent. They found that “…meta-analysis demonstrates that hypodescent patterns (e.g., Black/White target categorized as Black) are observed when (a) multiracial is operationalized as ancestry, (b) targets are male, and (c) categorization measures are binary (e.g., Black or White) or use multiple Likert-type scales. However, when targets are female, or when categorization measurement has multiple options, other patterns emerged (e.g., Black/White target categorized as White or Multiracial).” In other words, adherence to the concept of hypodescent within the United States varies.
In Brazil, understandings of racial categories tend to be based on phenotype rather than hypodescent. Within other regions of Latin America, people challenge the concept of hypodescent or outright reject it; however, these challenges can result in denials or erasure of Blackness. Looking at how racial formations in the Spanish Caribbean, and in the Dominican Republic in particular, have emerged, ideas about race come from distinct colonial histories and nation-building projects shaped by long-standing anti-Black and specifically anti-Haitian ideologies. These ideas are rooted in the island’s shared history with Haiti and Haiti’s formation as the first Black Republic of the Americas. These histories have produced racial logics that often emphasize gradation, mixture, and national distinction rather than strict binary classification.
Despite the varied ideas and experiences of Blackness across the United States and Latin America, the rule of hypodescent continues to shape understandings of Blackness in the United States. Denials or rejections of this rule are generally understood as a rejection of Blackness and even a manifestation of anti-Blackness. But should such denials always be understood in this way? In the face of legacies of racism and general anti-Blackness in both the United States and Latin America, is there space for fluid understandings of what it means (or not) to be Black? Furthermore, as biological anthropologists working on questions of race, biology, and health, how do fluid understandings of racial belonging function in population-based studies?
As Black biological anthropologists whose research is grounded in evolutionary theory, a population-based science, it is difficult to grapple with what appears to be anti-Blackness among communities we understand to be Black. However, we also understand that race is fluid, in that, at a basic level, neither phenotypes nor genotypes align with racial categories. Although we recognize that the use of race within population-based sciences is problematic, we also acknowledge its utility in research contexts as a means to understand the intersections among social structures, bodily variation, lived experience, and biology. This fluidity of race matters (or should) to biological anthropologists because, as practitioners of a population-based science, it is critically important to identify the intended study population. How then does the decidedly non-biological but biologically adjacent concept of race and by extension, Blackness, fit within evolutionary approaches to examine the biocultural nature of human experience?
During a recent project investigating the genetic ancestry of Afro-Puerto Ricans, we encountered a group of three friends, whom we will call Victor, Martha, and José, who wished to join the study. Eligibility criteria for participation included identifying as Afro-Puerto Rican or an equivalent term. In the genealogical questionnaire that we use to help contextualize genetic data and query lived experiences, we asked our participants open-ended questions about racial identification. In the questionnaire, participants answered in their own words using the way they talk and think about themselves every day, rather than using scripted racial categories. We designed the genealogical questionnaire recognizing that participants’ relationship to Blackness, and to race more broadly, grows out of their family stories, neighborhoods, and life experiences, and a simple checklist cannot capture that. Taking this approach helped us connect DNA results to lived experiences, showing how genetic ancestry and social identities shape each other, rather than treating genetics as separate from culture and history.
As Martha and José were filling out the survey, Victor asked for more information about the study’s purpose. After we explained that we were seeking individuals who identified as Black to learn more about the African origins of Afro-Puerto Ricans, he began describing his family to us. He talked about having a “Black grandmother” and “Mulatto father” and how “[he] feel[s] Black even though I know I look white.” Martha, who appeared racially ambiguous, identified as “Black among other things,” and wanted to know if it was even “acceptable for [her] to identify as Black.” The other friend, José, asked for clarification on the racial identification question. He was inclined to write down Hispanic when I (RNDLR) explained he could do what he wanted, but we were looking for something more specific; he shrugged and said, “Oh, then [write down] Black, simple.”
Participants also grappled with the genealogical questionnaire in other ways. We observed differing reactions to the question depending on participants’ ages. Some of the older individuals had stories like Victor’s, in which they mentioned a Black grandparent or another relative. Other participants refused to talk about race at all, claiming “We are all Puerto-Rican and that’s that.” However, several of the young adults seemed to hesitate less when responding. They reported being college students who had started clubs on their campus to celebrate their Blackness. Other young adult participants loudly claimed their Blackness, asserting that they were both Black and Puerto Rican, regardless of how they presented. The seeming disconnection between older and younger participants’ responses highlights another layer of complexity and illustrates a phenomenon observed across Latin America (e.g., El Salvador): young individuals embracing both their Black and Latin American heritage, challenging social conventions by embracing the fluidity of racial identity.
Revisiting the responses from Martha, Victor, and José, since Martha identified as “Black among other things,” does that mean she buys into the tri-ancestry narrative of Puerto Rico and therefore erases her Blackness? According to Godfrey’s commentators, would Martha be someone who “hates her Blackness”? Would Victor be correct in that even if one does not phenotypically present as Black, having Black family members automatically makes one Black? What about feeling like a “Black man,” even though one’s lived experiences will probably differ from those of Black-presenting men? Or does José’s line of reasoning trump everything, and identifying as Black is, in fact, simple? Furthermore, as biological anthropologists conducting the study, should we deny participation to Martha, Victor, or José because of their range of responses regarding their racial identities? Would an enforcement of one way of understanding Blackness result in condemning other communities to follow the one-drop rule that dominates the United States?
Although the concept of population is implicit in population-based sciences, one may argue that, within biological anthropology, the issue of how to approach the question of “population” critically is underappreciated. While researchers often take the question of population for granted, delimiting exclusionary/inclusionary criteria within broader histories and socio-political structures can be useful for shaping research design and improving methods to address study questions better. In the case of our genetic ancestry work with an Afro-Puerto Rican community, having a priori knowledge of not only race in general, but the history of racial dynamics, the politics surrounding racial identity in Puerto Rico, and the historic stigmatization of Blackness, resulted in us designing open-ended questions about racial identification in the genealogical survey. These questions solicited nuanced responses that reflected participants’ lived experiences. As illustrated through our interactions with Martha, Victor, and José, the fluidity of race and racial identity was not “simple” for some but could be far more complicated than just having a Black ancestor or not. By creating space for fluidity around the question of race within our study design, the experiences of Martha, Victor, and José, along with their varied perspectives on Blackness, ultimately enabled us to offer novel perspectives into the genetic legacies of contemporary Afro-Puerto Ricans.
Centuries of colonization, competing political agendas, and systemic oppression have shaped the ways people understand Blackness across different parts of the world (e.g., South African singer Tyla identifying as “a Black-colored woman”). Blackness, and more broadly race, can take many forms in the social histories and lives of participants. Thus, rather than mocking one interaction and using it to stereotype an entire group of people (or to get views on Instagram), there can be space for more nuanced understandings of the diverse experiences of Blackness, while not ignoring the fact that anti-Blackness does, in fact, exist. As biological anthropologists engaged in population-based research, we would be remiss to overlook critical approaches to population when designing and asking our questions. In fact, as illustrated in the vignettes, bioanthropological insights can lie within the most fluid spaces of what has been conventionally taken for granted.
Pablo Herrera Veitia and Darlène Dubuisson are the section contributing editors for the Association of Black Anthropologists.