In today’s news, Harper Lee, famed white girl novelist, sculptor of Scout Finch’s innocence in marble, passed away at age 89. Her death comes at a time when America is still reeling from Super Bowl Sunday’s revelation that Beyoncé is, in fact, black to the pit of her chiseled gleaming caramel syrup core. To patch the quivering gap in the America’s-Sweetheart-space-time-continuum, black-gay-male theater critic Hilton Als delivers a salve in the form of his 2014 un-novel White Girls. Two years ago, the provocatively packaged text spurred a host of think-pieces dissecting the deftness with which Als confounded his narratives with pearlescent mutations of white girl, as well as the extent to which Als brutalized white girl — titillating pornographic American imaginations since 1492 — by entwining her tortuously with black boy. “We were also the first line of Joni Mitchell’s autobiography: ‘I was the only black man in the room’… We were the amused ‘sickness’ that Eldridge Cleaver felt existed between white women and black men,” writes Als of he and his black-gay-male-lover, fellow white-girl-aficionado SL. “Did I love her or want to be her? Is there a difference?” Als muses about his sexy-ass “white-blond” faerie friend Marie. His rhetoric, already jostling America’s collectively queasy racial-political guts, preceded Rachel Dolezal, Michael Derrick Hudson/Yi Fen Chou, and the mountains of reviews concerning White Girls that continue to restate Als’s questions with bullish aplomb. To what extent does Als allow white girl to morph into a terror? How brittle is black boy to the touch of white girl fingernails?

Turns out, language can blur race when bodies can’t. The pressure of all these endlessly looping considerations has in fact done something to Als as he exists in our imaginations, dunking biscuits in tea with Harper Lee, swallowing Beyonce’s finely curved shadow with his own. Whereas once, Als was recognizable walking down the street, charcoal-black like his stubble in his iPhone selfies, cocoa-black like the bunching of skin under his chin when he smiled for the camera, now he registers to the casual voyeur as something muddier than a novel called Passing that passes as a novel about ‘passing.’ If you catch Als pausing at the edge of a puddle and peer over his shoulder, or if you see him refracted in the Instagram filter layers of a literary pixie’s hourly snapshots of her dinner party, you may be surprised to behold his face now dotted with freckles, flushed red from delight upon recalling slumber party secrets. What you see must not be a black boy — meaning it must not not be a white girl.