Over the years I have had strangers try repeatedly to make me over into a different kind of black. There was the Nigerian tennis player I dated for a while. He liked very much to introduce me as “the woman getting her Ph.D.” Didn’t I have any African in my family? I certainly looked like it, he suggested. And, if I did, it would make introducing me all the better. There was the man in Massachusetts who refused to accept that I was not West African. The basis for his incredulity was the Harvard T-shirt I was wearing while filling up my tank.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)