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mainstream sense.
    However, [2012 Republican presidential candidate] Herman Cain * makes me a lot blacker. [He] wears a cowboy hat and just says ridiculous stuff that most black people wouldn’t say. I think characters like that make me blacker by comparison. [There are] shades of blackness, and I think that I was towards the lesser black, but then if you have weird people coming along, then that pushes me towards the center, which is where I like to be.
    I’m also from the country . . . I’m from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which is a wretched place . . . I always considered that black. Black people are country. That’s what I thought until I got older and then I met black people who were like, “No, black people [are] hood.” I was like, “Oh, okay. Well, now I can’t do that either, because I’m from a cornfield.”
    When I went to boarding school, I met a lot of African-Americans who were . . . legitimately inner city or playing it up to try to retain some kind of blackness. Their whole thing was about Do the Right Thing , urban culture, Spike Lee. And I’m like, “This guy just seems angry and disgruntled.” That was not my experience of blackness.
    I had never had to fight to make a space for my blackness, because on the Eastern Shore you’re black or you’re white, but more important, your family’s been there for four hundred years, and you’re from the Eastern Shore. If you come from another place, even if you’re one year old, and you died at one hundred on the Eastern Shore, [they’d say], “Not a local.” So it was more about that identity of being from Maryland and being from the Eastern Shore.
    I’d never had to prove the blackness thing until I got out and older and other black people were like, “Hey, wait a minute. I’m black, you’re not.”
    No, I didn’t ask Christian how black he was, but I did ask him about how white he was:
    CHRISTIAN LANDER
    I’m about as white as it gets. My family came over on the Mayflower and then left the United States to stay loyal to England and moved to Canada during the Revolutionary War.
    As his is the most expert opinion I could find on the subject, I also asked him about notions of “whiteness,” especially since most of the Stuff White People Like checklist is based on beliefs, values, and tastes, not phenotypical traits.
    At my high school, anyone who liked something on the list and was not white was called white, was accused of acting white.
    â€¢ A “coconut” is brown on the outside and white on the inside. You could use that for Indian, you could use that for Latino, too. It’s your choice of which ethnicity you wish to disparage.
    â€¢ “Banana” is yellow on the outside, white on the inside, which is for Asians. The Twinkie is another replacement.
    â€¢ “Oreo” is obviously black on the outside and white on the inside.
    â€¢ I actually would probably be called what is known as an “egg” in my high school, which is white on the outside, yellow on the inside. I mean, I live in Koreatown, I grew up in Chinatown.
    We have it all. We have a wide variety of food-people: coconut, banana, Oreo, whatever you want.
    My own introduction to food-people, to blackness as a mere facade for interior whiteness, came with a change of schools.

Do You Know What an Oreo Is?
    A ccording to DC’s school districts at the time, my graduation from Bancroft Elementary School in the city’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood should have been followed by my attendance at Abraham Lincoln Junior High School a few blocks south of our home. There was just one problem with this regulation as far as my mother was concerned: kids at Lincoln got stabbed.
    I’m not sure how often child-stabbings occurred at this educational institution, but the fact that Lincoln had such a reputation, coupled with my penchant for