Against the Comfort of Color: On the Limits of “Black Identity”

Petros Dejene 

I have always felt uneasy when discussions turn to black identity. Not because I deny racism, colonial violence, or their enduring legacies—but because I find something deeply troubling in the idea that one’s sense of self should be anchored to skin color. The discomfort is philosophical, moral, and practical all at once.

If our moral aspiration is to judge human beings by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, then we must ask an uncomfortable question: does grounding identity in skin color move us closer to that ideal—or quietly undermine it?

There is an unresolved tension at the heart of racial identity discourse. On the one hand, racial categories were imposed by history—by slavery, colonialism, and pseudoscientific hierarchies. On the other hand, those same categories are now often embraced as positive identities. This creates a paradox. We claim to resist racial essentialism while simultaneously re-centering race as a defining feature of the self. What began as a response to injustice risks becoming a new form of reductionism. The danger is not merely theoretical. Once skin color becomes a primary identity marker, it reintroduces the very logic moral progress it seeks to transcend. To be clear, acknowledging race as a social reality is unavoidable. But transforming it into a core identity is a far stronger—and far more questionable—move.

Let’s ask ourselves: what, in concrete terms, do “black people” share? Beyond a shared experience of racialization, discrimination, and—often—colonial domination, the answer is surprisingly little. An Orthodox, Amharic-speaking Ethiopian from Gondar does not share language, religion, worldview, social structure, or historical memory with a Yoruba person from Nigeria. A Harari merchant does not share cultural life with a Mukongo farmer. An Addis Ababan is often culturally closer to a Yemeni than to a Jamaican. These are not marginal differences. They are foundational. Culture is lived, inherited, practiced—it is language, ritual, cuisine, kinship, memory. Skin color, by contrast, carries none of these on its own. To treat “blackness” as a culture is to mistake a political condition for a civilizational reality. When people speak confidently of “black culture” as though it were a coherent, unified entity, they flatten extraordinary diversity into a single abstraction. In doing so, they unintentionally echo the same logic that once erased that diversity in the name of racial hierarchy.

There is another risk—one often overlooked. When identity lacks substantive cultural grounding, it becomes vulnerable to simplification and stereotype. Once a “black identity” is assumed to exist, questions inevitably arise: What does it mean to be authentically black? What behaviors, tastes, politics, or attitudes qualify—or disqualify—someone? These questions, even when asked in good faith, create normative pressures that constrain individuality. They invite performance, policing, and exclusion. Ironically, this can reproduce the very harms racism inflicted: the reduction of complex human beings into racial scripts.

None of this is an argument against solidarity. On the contrary, there are compelling reasons for people racialized as black—across Africa and the diaspora—to cooperate in confronting the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and global inequality. But solidarity does not require a fabricated common identity. Political alliances can be built on shared interests, shared struggles, and shared ethical commitments without claiming cultural sameness. Black people can stand together as equals without pretending they share a single cultural essence. Alliance does not require fusion; cooperation does not require erasure. What is needed is clarity: a distinction between identity as essence and identity as context.

Skin color undeniably shapes how people are treated in the world. It should, however, not dictate who they are. My unease with “black identity” ultimately reflects a deeper commitment to individual dignity, cultural specificity, and moral universalism. I am wary of any framework—however well-intentioned—that replaces one form of reductionism with another. The goal should not be a world in which people retreat into color-coded selves, but one in which histories are acknowledged without imprisoning the present, and solidarities are forged without sacrificing truth. To resist racism is necessary but to confuse oppression with culture is not. To build alliances is wise but to invent identities without substance is dangerous. A just society does not require us to deny our histories—but it does require us to refuse the comfort of simplistic categories, even when they arrive bearing the language of empowerment.

Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com  

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