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rummaged through the kitchen counter of my friend’s apartment, looking for something to eat, I spotted the empty bottle of Negroamaro. I thought, “That’s pretty black of you, Baratunde.”
    As with most of my thoughts, I decided this was something I should share with the Internet, so I fired up the Twitter app on my phone and instigated a battle of blackness with my friend and fellow Brooklyn-based comedian Elon James White.
    On Wednesday, July 29, 2009, at 7:32 a.m., I pressed “send” on the following message:
    this weekend i picked my red wine because it was called “Negroamaro.” that’s how black i am. @elonjames #HowBlackAreYou
    Two minutes later, Elon responded, “Challenge, son?” and it was on. For the next several hours, we went back and forth trying to prove our blackness in a game of satirical one-upmanship. Others saw the #HowBlackAreYou hashtag flying across their screens and decided to join in. Before long, thousands of #HowBlackAreYou tweets had been generated.
    I later retold this story in a technology conference keynote address called “There’s a #Hashtag for That,” and got the attention of an editor at HarperCollins. After I met with her and her team, the title “How to Be Black” was born. I thought an entire book on “How Black Are You?” was a bit much. (But “How to Be Black” felt just fine!)
    Still, that original question interests me. It is an inextricable fact of blackness that one will at some point be referred to as “too black” or “not black enough” by white people, black people, and others. I’ve yet to meet the Negro who is “juuuuuust right” to everyone. So I turned the question over to The Black Panel. Here’s some of what they had to say in answer to the question “How black are you?”
    W. KAMAU BELL
    I guess we need to know who’s on the scale. I would probably say I’m in the middle. I’d say I’m solidly in the middle. I think I’ve spent most of my life in the middle of blackness, maybe just north of the middle as I’ve gotten older. I think I get more reason to be black the older I get.
    It’s like everything. The older you get, the more you get calcified in whatever direction you were going in. I feel about racism the way a lot of guys feel about male-pattern baldness. “This was supposed to be done by now!” Which makes me more black, like “Okay, then I’m going to really step up my game, my black game.”
    CHERYL CONTEE
    I’m pretty black on the inside. That said, genetically, it’s obvious there’s a little bit of a mix here. And that’s something that I’ve gotten to know over time more extensively through the oral histories of my family, very quietly learning the large extent to which people actually chose to live in the black community to be with the people that they love, which is really awesome and amazing. So I do pay homage to those other heritages, but I feel very much, very strongly, rooted in African-American culture.
    That said, I think that there is a stereotype that you’re not really black unless you grew up dodging bullets, or eating food stamps, or . . . I don’t know, actually engaging personally in rap battles or break dancing. I didn’t do any of those things. I may have witnessed some break dancing and some rap battles. Okay, that may have happened. But I didn’t personally do that.
    Sorry, eating . . . Did I say that, eating food stamps?
    ELON JAMES WHITE
    How black am I? It depends on the day of the week. It depends on who you ask. It depends on what situation I’m in. It depends on if my white girlfriend shows up. It depends on what topic happens to pop up.
    I’m fairly black to people. I’ve gotten blacker. Like, I wasn’t that black for a while, but then I got really, really black. And apparently when I got really black,