Black Americans are forced to inhabit a category called ‘the problem’

Evidence

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying it directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 32

Categorization

• DEFINE: The book’s guiding question ‘How does it feel to be a problem?’ is defined here via Du Bois — naming what it means to be cast as a problem rather than a person, and the indirect ways others approach it.
• ADDENDUM: The indirect questions Whites pose instead of the real one — ‘I know an excellent colored man’ — echo the displacement/signaling dynamics described in the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article where dress debates carry class and identity signaling rather than direct content.