Personally, I love Taylor Swift and One Direction and am almost always down to talk about what this or that celebrity is doing. I’m an amazingly awful dancer, I don’t hate country music and I took classical piano lessons for about eight years. You don’t have to say it, I’m well aware that by most standards I’m an Oreo.

And that’s exactly what I’d like to talk about – Oreos – not the actual snack but the term we’ve coined in relation to black people who don’t seem to ‘know they’re black’ or somehow missed the Being Black memo that was posted in the group chat. The more I think about it is the more I realise that this is a term that either needs to be done away with entirely or ought to be addressed and used with the utmost care and precision.

Firstly, being black is about a whole lot more than seasoning your meat, using slang, not being able to talk back to your mother, drinking Kool Aid, living in a certain kind of neighbourhood and being able to Milly Rock, and this is all pretty common sense. We know this. We are all so aware of this fact that we are rightly affronted when persons from other races suggest that there is precious little else to being black, and yet we deny someone membership to the black community or revoke their privileges based on little things like these. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy memes and Twitter jokes as much as the next person, but there is real harm to ourselves as individuals and to our strength as a black community in being clique-y and measuring blackness in how well we match up to certain stereotypes.

The aforementioned stereotypes aren’t necessarily harmful but what about when we get behind or unknowingly propagate stereotypes related to poor family life, criminal activity, violence and a disregard for good manners and a good education? Our willingness to own up these kinds of ills are not only an honest admission of some of the black community’s challenges but further show that too many of us have grown so comfortable with these things so much so that we identify them as our own distinct character traits or signature. And that’s not cool.

Moreover there are worse sins than not liking trap music or fried chicken, and to rob someone of community and oneness because of a few differences of opinion on food and music is pretty cruel. Not to mention the fact that it does us all no good. Haven’t you heard ‘united we stand, divided we fall’? While our international struggle for equality and justice as a race continues, too many of us are content to nitpick at each other and squabble over ridiculous things, and it only serves to weaken our movements as a spotlight is placed on our petty little fights instead of our age old struggle. In it’s own way it’s also a spin on clique-ism that should’ve been left in the eighth grade.

All that said, there are those who actively shun ties to the black community or even the very appearance of anything ‘black’. We all know them too, those that are all too busy trying to be ‘different’ for a black girl or black boy, and those that appear to spend their free time distancing themselves from black issues and black movements. Rest assured that this article isn’t in defence of that sort of behaviour. In fact if Oreos really do exist those black men and women, girls and boys that feel the need to constantly talk down on and distance themselves from their own race have earned the title fair and square. That being the case I’m sure we can all agree that it would be totally unfair to give that sash and crown away to anyone else.