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“So we’ve got a black in the family,” her father concluded with bemusement. He had just finished describing how someone on his side of the family had married and had a child with a Black man. He also has “a Black friend” whose existence is invoked whenever he needs to prove (to himself) that he isn’t racist. He talks down to and belittles this Black friend, a tall and gentle man who does not perform the kind of masculinity that threatens white men like her father. The Black friends of white racists can’t act Black because blackness threatens whiteness, but white people using their sole Black friend as fodder to prove that they aren’t racist is a distinctly white thing to do.
To say that there is “a black” instead of “a black person” in the family betrays the speaker’s prejudice, for the former utterance uses black as a noun that strips the Black person of their humanity by defining them solely in terms of blackness, whereas the latter uses black as an adjective that describes a person and thus maintains the Black person’s humanity by acknowledging that blackness is only one aspect of their personhood. Blackness is the only thing people like her father see in Black people, however, which is why Black lives must be proclaimed to matter.
Her father uses this same rhetoric when describing “gays,” “transgenders,” and anyone else whose lives don’t matter to him.
