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I have to believe that Lisa Taddeo was conscious, on some level, of the rhetoric she was using to advance her thesis about Jay-Z in a profile for Esquire, which hit the Internet this afternoon. The ham-fisted point she tried to convey: Jay-Z has become more than a pop culture icon in his career, but an ambassador for urban America. He is, Taddeo argues, the only world-renown entity who can seamlessly move from a Marcy Projects house party to a dinner gala with Bill Clinton without drastically altering his demeanor. These are fair assertions. But in her overzealous attempt to christen Jay-Z as a cultural bridge, she firmly establishes her vantage point on the opposite side of the water:

There is a deeper significance — a racial philanthropy — that perhaps neither man intended. Jay-Z is black black. He is old-school double-dark-chocolate-chunk black. He is black the way Labatt is blue. He is not white black, Barack black, like our president. Or the kind of black that doesn’t curse and deplores the n-word, the genteel black, like Oprah. He is, arguably, the first black-black guy to cross over into Oprah-land and Bill Clintonworld without making the Oprah-sized no-look-back forward flip that means you’re selling not necessarily your soul but perhaps something fleshier, a little more external.

I’ll be honest. I tried to read this paragraph in a hundred different ways, and I really tried to be charitable about it. Maybe “old-school double-dark-chocolate-chunk black” is just a clumsy way of saying Jay-Z is not light-skinned. Perhaps calling Barack Obama “white black” is more of a factual reference to his mixed-race heritage. It could be that Oprah is “genteel” in the way that Rachael Ray is genteel — although you’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who might call Rachael Ray “genteel white.” This is where things get tenuous. There are, in fact, two distinct concepts of race that Taddeo is playing with here — that of factual ancestry and that of perceived cultural attributes — and one of them is steeped in historical notions of white superiority. In other words, she is assuming that we judge Jay-Z and Obama and Oprah not based on what they are, but rather, on what they’re not: Jay-Z is “black black,” a whimsical way of saying that he is, make no mistake, neither ethnically nor characteristically white. Oprah is, on the other hand, “genteel black” — a subtle adjectival insinuation which implies that blacks are not inherently genteel. These are, quite frankly, textbook examples of “Othering.”

I’ve been told, more times than I care to admit, that I “talk white.” But what does this mean, really? Does my ethnicity, as a Hispanic-American, require that I use some form of Spanglish? Would I be more culturally authentic if I listened to Big Pun records? Is my insistence on using the so-called “standard” English a sign that I am, perhaps, “white brown?” The answers to these questions all depend on some sort of racially normative standard. But who gets to decide what’s normal?

If you read Taddeo’s feature through the eyes of this, her closing argument, you will be pressed to believe that Jay’s story is not simply remarkable in terms of his achievement and perseverance or talent, but because he is “old-school double-dark-chocolate-chunk black.” You’ll be tempted to believe that Barack Obama’s “white” is somehow stronger than his “black” — meaning what, I’m not sure — and that, therefore, his achievement — as President of the United Fucking States — is, therefore, somehow less incredible. You might even want to believe that African Americans who choose to refrain from using “the n-word” lack the ethnic authenticity of, say, Ice Cube. But these ideas are all reinforcements of the very same skewed racial perceptions Taddeo thinks she’s critiquing. As if being othered from white people isn’t enough, she writes as if we should be othered from ourselves.