He means what kind of special negro are you? - Tressie McMillan Cottom

In sociology, we often refer to black people who are in the United States but who are not descendants of either the enslaved or, later, of those who experienced the Great Migration as “black ethnics.” It is a complicated term because it implies that black Americans do not have an ethnicity.

We were respectable.13 We went to church and paid tithes and wore slips and we drank but had the good sense to be ashamed that we did.

their feet. That is a black woman’s specialty. The personal essay had become the way that black women writers claim legitimacy in a public discourse that defines itself, in part, by how well it excludes black women. In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act.