When Does a Black Person Get to Be Just One Person?

There are certain phrases whose apparent ordinariness conceals a much more consequential way of thinking about race. “You people”, “you lot” and “your lot” are among them. I have heard these expressions in different contexts and from people of different racial and cultural backgrounds. What interests me is not simply that they can be offensive. More significant is the epistemological move they perform: an individual ceases, momentarily, to be understood as an individual and becomes representative of a racial, national or continental collective.

The question that follows is deceptively simple: when does a Black person get to be just one person?

I was reminded of this question during a conversation in which someone asked me whether men “in your country” were permitted to have multiple wives. When I asked where this understanding had come from, I discovered that the source was someone from Kenya. I am Zimbabwean. Kenya and Zimbabwe are distinct countries, separated not only geographically but by different histories, ethnic formations, languages, legal systems and social practices. Yet knowledge attributed to one Kenyan person had travelled effortlessly across the continent and arrived at me as knowledge about “your country”.

I found myself explaining the geography of Africa using a map.

The incident might appear trivial, even humorous. However, the underlying assumption was not. Kenya had become interchangeable with Zimbabwe because both were located in Africa, while Africa itself had been imagined almost as a single social and cultural space. One African person had, in effect, become authorised to stand for Africa.

This collapsing of difference is important because Blackness is frequently required to carry a degree of internal sameness that would be considered analytically unacceptable when applied to many white populations. Zimbabweans are not Kenyans. Kenyans are not Nigerians. Nigerians are not Jamaicans. Jamaicans are not Black Americans. Nor, within any of these categories, are people homogeneous in relation to class, gender, ethnicity, religion, migration, education, politics or experience.

This does not mean that Blackness is meaningless as a political or analytical category. Shared structures of racialisation can produce forms of recognition and solidarity across considerable national and cultural differences. A Black person in Britain may recognise something profoundly disturbing in the racial treatment of a Black person in the United States despite having neither the same nationality nor the same historical experience. Political solidarity does not, however, require social interchangeability. Shared racialisation and individual difference can exist simultaneously.

The difficulty arises when Blackness ceases to describe a structural location or political identification and instead becomes an explanation for the behaviour of individuals.

There is a striking asymmetry in the ways racial difference is sometimes organised. Whiteness can accommodate considerable internal differentiation. Nationality, region, class, religion, culture and historical experience are readily invoked to explain why one white population should not be confused with another. British people are not Polish people; Polish history is not Portuguese history; Portuguese colonial history cannot simply be substituted for German history. Such distinctions are entirely reasonable. Serious scholarship depends upon them.

The question is why the same analytical generosity is not always extended to Black populations.

I have encountered situations in which the actions of one Black person have prompted questions about Black people generally. A Black person is associated with drug trafficking and another, entirely unrelated, Black person is asked whether “Black people” behave in this way. A Black woman wears locs and is asked whether she smokes cannabis. The individual becomes legible through an already available racial script.

What is striking in such encounters is the speed with which individuality disappears. The person asking the question may know almost nothing about the individual standing before them. Yet the racial category is assumed to supply the missing knowledge.

This is what makes expressions such as “you lot” analytically interesting. The phrase performs a collectivising function. The individual is addressed, but the imagined collective is being spoken to.

The problem, therefore, is not differentiation within whiteness. White populations should be differentiated. The problem is the unequal distribution of specificity.

If nationality, culture, history, class and political context are necessary for understanding white human beings, Black human beings require no less analytical precision.

Individuality is usually understood as an inherent characteristic of the human person. Socially, however, the right to be treated as an individual may be distributed unevenly.

To be individualised is to be permitted to have one’s actions attributed primarily to oneself. A person can succeed, fail, behave foolishly, commit wrongdoing or achieve something extraordinary without those actions automatically becoming evidence about millions of other people.

This distinction becomes particularly visible when wrongdoing occurs.

When a white academic commits academic misconduct, the obvious object of investigation is the academic concerned. The person’s research, qualifications, conduct and institutional responsibilities may properly be scrutinised. What does not ordinarily follow is an inquiry into whether white people possess the intellectual capacity to undertake doctoral research. Nor does the misconduct of one white professor ordinarily provoke questions about whether white academic excellence itself has been exposed as fraudulent.

The absurdity of such an inference is immediately apparent.

Yet racialised individuals can acquire a representational burden that extends far beyond their own conduct. Their achievements may be narrated as evidence of racial progress, while their failures can become evidence in arguments about diversity, merit, institutional standards or the intellectual legitimacy of the wider group.

The individual is therefore not merely accountable for what they have done. They become symbolically accountable for what others believe their racial group represents.

I think of this as a distinction between individual accountability and representational accountability.

Individual accountability asks: What did this person do?

Representational accountability asks, implicitly or explicitly: What does what this person did tell us about people like them?

The latter question is where racial collectivisation becomes particularly dangerous.

This unequal distribution of individuality is not confined to adults. It can begin in childhood.

Black children have long been discussed in relation to processes of adultification, through which they may be perceived as older, less innocent, more threatening or more responsible for their actions than comparable white children. What interests me here is how adultification intersects with the denial of individuality.

Childhood ordinarily permits interpretive generosity. When a child behaves badly, adults may ask about peer pressure, vulnerability, family circumstances, immaturity, exploitation or a failure to understand consequences. None of these questions necessarily absolves the child of responsibility. Rather, they preserve the child as a developing human being whose actions require context.

The racialised child may not always receive the same contextual generosity.

Instead of being understood as one child who made one decision under particular circumstances, the child can become evidence of a broader problem: Black criminality, Black parenting, Black families, Black boys, Black culture.

The movement from individual to category occurs again.

To insist upon the individuality of that child is not to deny wrongdoing. It is to insist that accountability should remain attached to the person and the circumstances in which the action occurred rather than becoming a racial inheritance.

“Africans Sold Africans”

The same epistemological problem appears in historical discourse.

The familiar statement that “Africans sold Africans” is revealing precisely because of the enormous amount of historical specificity it removes. “Africa” becomes a coherent political actor, while people living within radically different kingdoms, societies, linguistic communities and political formations are retrospectively transformed into members of a single racial collective.

The statement is not made more analytically useful simply because African actors participated in systems of enslavement and slave trading. The historical question is not whether African participation existed; it did. The question is what analytical work is performed by collapsing historically distinct actors into the racial category “Africans”.

We rarely approach European history with comparable imprecision. To say that “Europeans killed Europeans” may be factually accurate in relation to numerous wars, but it explains virtually nothing. Historical analysis immediately requires greater specificity: which states, which populations, which political interests, which period, which conflict and under what conditions?

European complexity is preserved because serious explanation requires it.

African complexity should require the same.

The problem with “Africans sold Africans”, therefore, is not simply moral or political. It is epistemological. It retrospectively imposes racial collectivisation upon historical actors whose political identities, relationships and conflicts cannot adequately be explained through contemporary racial categories alone.

Blackness as an Object of Knowledge

This question of collectivisation also belongs to a much longer history concerning the production of knowledge.

Black people have repeatedly been positioned as objects of investigation. Black families, educational attainment, bodies, cultures, communities, sexuality, criminality and supposed social deficits have been observed, measured, classified and theorised. Africa itself has frequently been represented through categories produced elsewhere: poor, underdeveloped, tribal, corrupt, dependent.

The description of Africa as “poor” is instructive. Poverty is often presented as though it were an intrinsic characteristic of the continent rather than a condition requiring historical and political explanation. Yet a continent containing immense mineral, agricultural and human resources can simultaneously contain populations experiencing profound material deprivation. The relevant analytical questions therefore concern extraction, ownership, colonial histories, unequal economic relations, governance and the distribution of value.

To describe a place as poor without examining the production of poverty risks turning an historical condition into an essential characteristic.

There is an important epistemological relationship here. Some populations become objects requiring explanation while those producing the explanation can remain comparatively unmarked.

The direction of the gaze matters.

When Black scholars reverse that gaze and make whiteness itself an object of analysis, demands for differentiation can emerge quickly. Which white people? Which nationality? Which class? Which historical period? Which political tradition?

These are legitimate questions.

Indeed, they demonstrate the point.

If whiteness contains sufficient internal complexity to make context indispensable, Blackness must be afforded the same complexity.

The objective should not be to respond to the collectivisation of Black people by collectivising white people in return. It should be to expose an epistemological asymmetry in which some people are readily recognised as internally differentiated while others are repeatedly rendered knowable through the category assigned to them.

This is the context in which I have been thinking about the public discussion surrounding Professor Jason Arday.

I did not know Arday personally, and this essay does not attempt to determine the truth or otherwise of the various allegations that have circulated about him. Those are empirical questions and should be treated as such. Evidence can be examined, claims can be verified or disproved, investigations can reach conclusions, and records can be corrected where necessary. I do not need to conduct that investigation here. Academic integrity matters, and racial identity should not exempt anyone from legitimate scrutiny.

My concern begins elsewhere.

At what point did questions concerning the biography or credentials of one Black professor become connected to wider claims about DEI, merit, “Black excellence”, “Black mediocrity” and the legitimacy of Black academic achievement?

That movement matters.

A question about an individual’s integrity can properly be expressed as: Did this individual make claims that were untrue?

It is a fundamentally different proposition to ask what allegations concerning one Black academic supposedly reveal about diversity initiatives, Black intellectual legitimacy, or the academic standards of Black scholars more generally.

At that point, the individual begins to carry a representational burden.

Arday is no longer being discussed solely as Arday. He becomes an object through which arguments about Blackness itself can be conducted.

This is precisely why the eventual factual resolution of individual allegations cannot settle the larger question that concerns me. If particular allegations are substantiated, the appropriate conclusions should attach to the individual and to the particular conduct established by the evidence. They cannot logically establish that another Black scholar’s doctorate is less legitimate, that Black intellectual excellence has somehow been disproved, or that the academic achievements of unrelated Black people should become newly suspect.

The individual must remain analytically distinguishable from the category.

There is a danger that calls for individualisation can be misunderstood as demands for exoneration. They are not.

A human being can lie, cheat, commit fraud or perpetrate serious violence and still possess human dignity. Due process exists precisely because dignity and procedural fairness cannot depend upon first establishing that an accused person is morally admirable.

Individualisation operates according to the same principle.

To individualise somebody is not to declare them innocent. Context is not exoneration. Dignity is not immunity from accountability. Rather, individualisation establishes the proper boundaries of accountability.

I can be held accountable for what I have done. I should not be required to answer for what you have decided my race means.

This is ultimately what troubles me about the ease with which Black individuals can become representatives. One person’s success can be made to carry the expectations of racial progress; one person’s failure can be made to carry the burden of racial deficiency.

Both deny something fundamental: the right to remain an individual.

The Black person becomes a symbol before being permitted to remain a human being.

Perhaps, then, the question is not whether Black people possess individuality. Of course we do. The more difficult question concerns the social and epistemological conditions under which that individuality is recognised.

Who is permitted to fail individually?

Who is permitted to succeed individually?

Whose wrongdoing remains their own?

Whose wrongdoing becomes evidence about their community?

Who receives historical specificity?

Who is reduced to “you people”, “you lot” or “your lot”?

And who is permitted to occupy the apparently neutral position from which everybody else is classified?

These questions extend far beyond any one academic controversy. They concern the organisation of knowledge itself: who becomes an object of knowledge, who is authorised to produce knowledge about whom, and whose internal differences are considered significant enough to require explanation.

Perhaps one of the less discussed privileges of racial power is precisely this: the presumption that one is entitled to be encountered as an individual rather than as evidence of a category.

Black people should not have to earn that presumption.

Sometimes a Black person’s achievement should belong to that person. Sometimes their failure should belong to them too. Sometimes a Black child should be permitted to be one child, an African historical actor one historically situated actor, and a Black academic one academic whose work and conduct can be evaluated without placing Black intellectual legitimacy on trial alongside them.

Sometimes a Black person should be permitted to be exactly what everyone else already assumes themselves to be: one person.