“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” is an oft-used sentenced, so frequently quoted that the threads binding the many facts, feelings and fictions contained in the above 13-word-sentence are almost bare and fraying. This short phrase does some heavy lifting. It makes its first appearance in Zorah Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me”. Stark, unrelenting; it captures the reader in crosshairs, a severe, darkened silhouette in a sea of glaring whiteness.

In Glen Ligon’s artwork “Untitled: Four Etchings”, those 13 words are repeatedly stencilled on a long white panel. The first line is clear to read, the letters space themselves politely away from each other, each line making tidy angles on the canvass behind it. As the viewer's eyes travel down, the black ink begins to bleed outside of the letters containing it, staining and blotting the backdrop until it is no longer sharp. The white is no longer unsullied. The boundaries are threatened.

“I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against A Sharp White Background: An Elegy”, a poem by Morgan Parker, also references the popular Zorah Neale Hurston line. But unlike Lignon, who allows the words and ink to bleed into each other, Parker distances them, putting words on separate lines, breaking the phrase apart, interjecting as if seeking affirmation from Hurston.

“Or, I feel sharp White. Or,
Colored Against. Or, I am
thrown. Or, I am
Opposed. Or, When White.
Or, I Sharp. Or, I Color.”

The final episode of Race Beyond Borders offers a retrospective glance at some of the more dense, complex and enlightening insights distilled from the second season of the podcast, which penetrates the edges of popular understanding in search of underexplored blackness across the world. Anchored by our Season 2 host, Sebabatso Manoedi (Moya Editor-In-Chief and the executive director of AFRE) and Nigel Richards – a director and facilitator of AFRE’s fellowship programme - the conversation takes the form of a dance as Sebabatso hands the hosting baton over to Nigel. The season finale takes the listener on a sonic safari that traverses sometimes shifting and limiting notions of Blackness from The Caribbean, Oceania, Martinique, Columbia, Italy and even Cape Town, where he discovered that his identity reads differently to his Black South African students.

“I think one episode in this last season that really spoke to me and I could relate to was the episode about Mexico and the Dominican Republic,” recalls Richard. In Black Royalty and Joy in Latin America, we meet Miguel Valerio, a scholar of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. He explains how he’s been read and racialised differently in his travels across Latin America, shifting between White and Black, sometimes without his own participation.

“The speaker talked about how his race and his proximity to whiteness changed with a flight,” continues Richard. “He talked about getting on a plane and going to Haiti and how his whiteness and blackness is sort of proximal to the geography he was in.”

Nigel Richards is American, but he finds himself based in Brooklyn after travels to Japan, a European sojourn and nine years in South Africa. He has been unpacking his experiences of race in different parts of the world. South Africa is a racial hotspot. As late as 2017, a man named Glen Snyman pierced a membrane thinly bordering a number of racial tensions that are constantly bubbling under the surface. Snyman, who is considered Coloured under South African Apartheid law was charged with fraud after ticking a box marked “African” on an application form for a head teacher post.

One of the pillars of Apartheid was the Population Registration Act. Introduced in 1950, it divided South Africans into four broad groups - White, African, Coloured and Indian - to enforce the minority government's policy of racial segregation. According to the Act, a White person is one who appears obviously White, is not obviously non-White, is generally understood as White and does not have any Coloured or Bantu parents. A Black person (referred to as Bantu in the text) is a person who is, or has indigenous African lineage. And a Coloured person is a person who is neither White and Black. The act was repealed in 1991, but the categories are ingrained.

“In South Africa, I moved into a whole different categorisation either being called White or Coloured, and the White really threw me. There would be parts of the country or interactions where my blackness just didn’t translate. There was a moment where - I was a classroom teacher- I kept talking about ‘we’ to my all-black students and so I was referring to things as a black person, as I would speak in the US. One of my students put up their hand and said ‘Mr. Nigel, I don't understand what you’re talking about. You’re not Black’’. And in a moment that appears on the face of it, almost a reversal of the Hurston line, Nigel Richard becomes less black against a stark black backdrop. At that moment, like many moments before in his life, how he understood himself in the world did not render in an altered political terrain. What happens in that space, when the language we develop to create belonging in the world is limited and in turn becomes limiting?

In 2015, confronting anti-black racism and redefining Blackness became mainstream conversation in South Africa as the student-led movement “Rhodes Must Fall (RMF)” forced the country and its institutions to interrogate the legacy of colonisation and institutionalised anti-Black racism. An interesting consequence of RMF was a mass interrogation of “Political Blackness”. The students put language to an identity friction experienced by the non-white people who fell under that blanket term and challenged the epistemological violence inflicted on black students and staff.

At the same time in the USA, the extra-judicial killing of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Missouri had galvanised Americans around the Black Lives Matter(BLM) Movement. What happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson would give birth to a movement that set the nation on course for a continuous public reckoning on race that stretched beyond conversations of police brutality and the racialised carceral system. Both #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter have taken place in self-described democracies with a history of genocide of indigenous people, racialised slavery and legalised segregation. Both movements examined the mechanisms that provide a hospitable environment for systemic racism and anti-blackness to thrive. They exposed, to quote Nelson Maldonado-Torres, that “democracy without decolonisation becomes a form of becomes a form of systemic racism”. Decolonisation recognises that we still live under colonial systems that have violently erased other ideologies, to allow for other ways of being that are not predicated on exploitation, extraction and domination.

“I think sometimes we reinforce and recenter whiteness in our understanding of Blackness always of being in conversation with Whiteness,” Manoedi has hosted Race Beyond Borders for the past three seasons, driven by a curiosity about the many various expressions of Black life. “What happens to Black people who aren't in contact with White people? What is Black life when it isn't mediated through English? What do we call black people in Martinique? In Italy? How is Blackness understood linguistically in Iran and what are the implications of that? I think I've just been struck by the world of possibilities that opens up when you have different language access points.”

Adama Sanneh was born in Italy to an Italian Catholic mother and a Muslim Senegalese/Gambian father. He describes himself as African, European, Italian, Gambian, Senegalese, blue collar, bourgeois, Muslim Catholic, and Black and White man. All of the above, and none of the above either. In the episode titled Crafting a Black Identity, he guides us through his coming of age as a Black Italian man in a national context marked by this paucity of Black community. Five years ago, he gathered a group of 24 friends and strangers in his Milan apartment. “It was the first time for each one of us to be with more than one Afro-Italian in the same space at the same time,” Sanneh says. That night, the newly assembled group of Black Italians considered whether they might choose a word in Italian to refer to themselves.

“I was struck by Adama’s episode where I think he just really brought me into the grappling of naming,” reflects Richard. “How in Italian some things just don't translate. There just isn't a word for Blackness in the way that it exists in the US context. And then as he has this group of Black Italians. The freedom that that group found in not naming themselves, was really powerful. He comes back at the end of the episode, realising and claiming that politically you need to count on race, and so I just felt the complexity of the lived experience in Italy. Wanting to name… and needing not to name.”

The naming of things is particularly contentious. We understand that we need to be able to put language to experience. Through naming the world it becomes concrete, and the people doing the naming become arbiters of its meaning. To name something is to make it real, and significant. And to be able to confer meaning and significance is power. Naming becomes parameter, boundary, edge. And much like our bodies, we are primarily concerned with the names of things when their edges are threatened. When their borders become porous in meaning and confused in function and fact.

Richard’s encounter in that classroom in South Africa, is not his first confrontation with the ways in which Blackness is codified differently, and how its meaning is primarily informed by the politics of the intimate. Domesticity, friendship. Home. Speaking about being a teacher, he recounts the early formations of his identity. He speaks of difference, otherness and injustice in the intimate (and instructive) institutions of school and family. “I grappled in my own sense with this identity of being a teacher, and my political journey started very much in school. I think how I experienced injustice and anti-black racism was in the schooling system and in my family as a student. And seeing how my brothers and I were treated and also across the skin gradient – my brothers are darker than I – we were all getting the short end of the stick in really aggressive ways that have been popularised recently in literature and analysis. But realising that amongst us boys, some of us got it worse. Some of the violence we experience through the schooling system penetrated our family. I think a lot of anti-black racism does. Where does anti-black racism and its harms end up, it ends up in the home. We may experience it on the street or in a boardroom, or in school. At the end of the day we come home to our families, and it sits and it sows and it festers.”

Zora Neale Hurston did not realise she was Black until her family life was disrupted. Until the boundaries of the intimate were threatened and penetrated. Growing up in the all-Black town of Eatonville, where her mother was a teacher and her father a preaching sharecropper turned Mayor, the only difference between her and the white people who rode through town was precisely that. That they rode through town. That they did not stay there. Later in life, Eatonville would feature in her writing as a place where African Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. But in 1904, her mother died. In 1905, her father remarried, and she was subsequently sent away to a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. It is here that she would discover her Blackness. She writes in How It Feels To Be Colored Me: “I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a Zora. When I disembarked from the riverboat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County anymore, I was now a little Colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown--warranted not to rub nor run.”