Do you think you speak for the "black community" or do you speak for yourself as a black woman. I follow much of what you write, and it seems the latter is what you write about. And that is fine. You have your opinions, and you have your perspectives, they are not wacky or weird, but simply different than other blacks and mine on many matters.

I find the black community incredibly diverse, and I think that is a good thing. And I do care about how people identify themselves because my family is put under continual pressure by society to identify themselves based on their skin color, when we are one family comprised of people from four races.

The shared experience of our family makes even those who are of one race feel more mixed race. The question is not whether a white man should gatekeep blackness, but whether anyone should gatekeep blackness. My Asian wife says after 36 years I act like I am half Asian, I could argue she acts like she is half white, but that would mean defining what Asian and white are.

As a society, we can't even gatekeep what defines a woman and that would normally seem easier than determining who is black. My favorite example of questioning one's racial identity was when Elizabeth Warren proudly said that her DNA results proved she is Native American since she tested positive for being between 1/64 and 1/1024th Native American. Seriously, at those percentages most people are mixed race, so let's just stop labeling people based on skin color.

Now when it comes to "blackness" some writers make the point that "blackness" in America has nothing to do with DNA and everything to do with the history, traditions, culture, and experiences of your family over the past few hundred years. In other words, "being black" is an ethnicity more than a racial identity not unlike saying one is West Indian, Haitian, Nigerian, etc.

For them every citizen with African DNA qualifies as being African American, but not "being black". Now things are getting really complicated and the irony is that how can anyone "gatekeep" blackness when not even blacks can agree on what it means to be "black".

However, people do try to gatekeep race for a host of reasons, raises the question... why? My sense is none of those reasons are particularly positive, but instead are primarily used to divide us.