They Were Comfortable Summoning Blackness
This is the contradiction: Black culture is invited everywhere that Black authority is refused.
Black culture had already furnished the room before I entered it. Through Japan, graduate school, public racial-erotic identity, neurodivergent intensity and justice work, I trace what happens when Asian American proximity to Blackness is mistaken for relationship—and when the Black body being accessed finally names the extraction.
They Were Comfortable Summoning Blackness ◉)) I Hear Tings — One Aural World
From the Amber Tings Spotify Playlist
Tierra Whack — “CLONES”
A world where the copy learns the signal so thoroughly that it begins mistaking repetition for origin. The language, styling, politics, rhythm and signs of intimacy can all be reproduced. The source’s history, labor, risk and structural location cannot.
“CLONES” enters They Were Comfortable Summoning Blackness at the exact point where proximity begins performing as equivalence. These relationships could mirror Black language, circulate Black creativity and receive the depth of Black care while remaining structurally elsewhere. The copy could travel farther than the body it learned from and still be treated as more legible than the source.
Tierra Whack — “CLONES” — replication without relationship
The song does not merely accompany this essay. It reveals the duplication machinery beneath it: similarity without shared location, access without reciprocity and intimacy reproduced as public identity.
Float it for intention wherever you listen to your music tings.
a note to float before we begin
Some people have money, property, institutional access and the shelter of cisheterosexual domesticity, then arrive online costumed as poor and queer. They borrow precarity as texture. They use poor queer bodies as evidence that they belong to struggles they can exit whenever they choose. Our lives become their content, emotional infrastructure and proof of political intimacy.
I have watched these same people become platformed almost immediately—crossing 10,000 followers in a fraction of the time it took me to reach the same number. It took me more than ten years of making, teaching, documenting and building an entire Cosmos to cross 10K. They entered already buffered by money, legibility and the freedom to perform vulnerability without being materially governed by it. Then the platform treated their proximity to poor queer life as authority.
That is the violence beneath the cosplay. They can extract the language, intimacy, creativity and political credibility of people whose precarity is real, then circulate those materials farther and faster than the bodies they came from. They get to become visible through our lives while we remain responsible for surviving them.
Both arrived with ruptures in their relationship to mothering—one through early maternal death, the other through adoption. I knew this. What I did not understand quickly enough was how those ruptures were being placed onto my body.
I live in a mammy body: big, plush, receiving, presumed capable of holding whatever other people cannot hold for themselves. The stereotype never stopped. It simply learned the language of intimacy, queerness, healing and mutual care. I spent most of these relationships in the mother’s position—soothing, witnessing, feeding, making, regulating and affirming. Because the contact was intense, I mistook being needed for being met. But their need for maternal care did not make the exchange equal. It gave them access to mine. No corresponding space was opened for me to be held, protected or nurtured in the ways my own body requires.
On intensity
Intensity did not mean that one of these relationships happened quickly or existed only in my imagination. There were specific conversations about the trust this would entail from me with past history. We built it across a full year: through repeated Instagram Lives, private Signal conversations, daily witnessing, creative promises and plans for a future that I treated as real. The archive remains. I can trace the intimacy, the assurances, the contradictions and the promises that were never kept across platforms and across time.
That year was not empty simply because the relationship eventually revealed itself as unequal. It was full—full of access to me, my care, my thought, my creativity and my public presence. While I was investing in what I believed we were building, this person was living a completely different life outside of their IG personality, while leaving their promises to me suspended. My care remained available in the present.
This is why intensity must be distinguished from infrastructure without being dismissed as briefness. A year is long enough to establish trust, ritual and expectation. Long enough for somebody to become embedded in your private and public life. Long enough to use what you provide. The absence of durable reciprocity does not mean there was no relationship. It means the relationship was structured so that one person could receive its depth without becoming accountable to it.
They Were Comfortable Summoning Blackness
Jin, Jinn, and the Intimacy of Extraction
The word arrived twice before I understood it as a pattern: once inside a public username, once inside a name. I will not reproduce either here. I am not interested in summoning individuals. I am interested in what moved through the relationships.
Jinn are often spoken of as supernatural beings, but the word also carries the sense of that which is concealed from the senses, veiled from sight. That is where I enter this—not through the fantasy of turning Asian people into mythical creatures, not through a racial pun pretending to be analysis, but through the force that remained invisible while shaping the room. The arrangement I could feel before I could fully name. The thing moving between intimacy and extraction while everybody involved insisted we were simply in community.
This is about the tension that exists between Asian American and African American bodies, but I am speaking particularly about cis women, femmes and queer folx because that is where these encounters found me. I am speaking from relationships that entered through the language of art, justice, neurodivergence, queerness, shared marginalization and Black-and-Brown solidarity. Relationships that arrived with intensity. Relationships that felt, for a time, like recognition.
DEI&B cover designed by Kiing Curry for Yejin Jeong and Jeong Coaching & Consulting LLC. Table of contents from Kiing Curry’s larger DEI&B design system for Jeong Coaching & Consulting LLC. Appendix cover from the extensive visual system Kiing Curry created for Yejin Jeong. “Honor impact over intent”-the irony inside work Kiing Curry designed 4 Jeong Coaching & Consulting
But intensity is not infrastructure. Similar language does not mean similar location. Two bodies can recognize pieces of themselves in each other without occupying the same arrangement. And when the colonial standard has already made Black culture available to everybody, proximity to a Black person can feel like permission long before relationship has established what is actually being shared.
Blackness had arrived before I did
I learned that early, although I did not yet have the language for it. I went to Japan in the eighth grade(1998) via the Zama/Smyrna TN Sister Cities Student Exchange.. Everywhere I went, people looked. People stared. People wanted photographs. I was a Black body moving through a place where Blackness was already present as image, sound, style and commodity, even when relationship with Black people was not. I saw shirts carrying the N-word and other pieces of language severed from the bodies that had made them mean something. The words had traveled. The music had traveled. The posture had traveled. The Black body arrived and became spectacle.
They recognized the product before they recognized the person.
That experience did not teach me that every Japanese person or every East Asian person relates to Blackness in the same way. It taught me something more useful: culture can circulate farther than accountability. A people can become aesthetically familiar while remaining humanly distant. Blackness can be everywhere and Black people can still be treated as an interruption when we arrive carrying our own memory, discernment and boundaries.
Years later I attended graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, inside a region with a large and varied Asian community. Hip-hop was already global infrastructure. Asian American cultural formations were not merely consuming it quietly; they were helping produce its highly visible contemporary forms. The Jabbawockeez, an Asian American hip-hop dance crew, moved from that wider California terrain into MTV-era popular culture and beyond. I am not mentioning them to accuse a dance crew of my interpersonal experiences. I am locating the atmosphere. By then, Black cultural language could offer movement, cool, rebellion, visibility and commercial possibility across bodies, even as the Black people who generated that language continued to be disciplined for how we moved through the world.
This is the contradiction: Black culture is invited everywhere that Black authority is refused.
The culture can enter as fashion, choreography, political vocabulary, spiritual technology, erotic charge or social-media strategy. The Black body can enter as collaborator, educator, audience, evidence, labor and emotional infrastructure. But when that Black body says, This is not mutual. You are taking something from me, the whole story changes. Suddenly the person naming the extraction is aggressive. Unstable. Wounded. Ungenerous. Incapable of solidarity.
Suddenly everybody can see the Black person, but nobody can see the arrangement.
The Username Was the Advertisement.
One encounter made this especially visible. An Asian woman dating a Black man publicly used Afro - naut - bunny as their Instagram username. They did not merely call themself this in a private erotic exchange. This was the name displayed to the world—the name through which they advertised themself, gathered attention and made their racial-erotic positioning publicly legible.
That matters.
“Afro” named the cultural and racial material being assumed. "Naut" named psycadelic culture. “Bunny” carried the vocabulary of kink, fetish, sexual performance and erotic availability. Joined together, the username did not simply describe an interracial relationship. It converted proximity to a Black partner into a public identity.
It made Blackness wearable.
Searchable.
Followable.
Consumable.
I do not do kink.
I do not believe domination becomes politically neutral because the people reenacting it call the scene consensual. We live in a country that has not stopped using the Black body as racial commodity. Sexual exploitation is not a side note in that history; it is one of its primary technologies. Black flesh was bred, inspected, displayed, violated, sold and made available for white pleasure, white profit and white fantasy. Plantation politics do not become liberatory because somebody selects a safe word. The choreography does not lose its history because the participants say it is what they like, what they dig or what they do.
To me, it is a laughable fucking joke.
Absolutely not.
Get away from me.
Every person I have personally engaged who was deeply invested in kink culture has also been deeply disembodied. I am not making a clinical diagnosis of every stranger who owns a harness. I am naming what has repeatedly met me in relationship: people using elaborate scripts of control, submission, performance, pain and sensation while being unable to remain present inside the unperformed body. People calling reenactment freedom because choice appeared at the entrance, even when the room itself had been built by domination.
The colonial arrangement did not disappear. It became a preference.
What two people do with each other does not remain private when their racial-erotic construction becomes a public brand. A Black partner cannot issue communal Black consent. Access to one Black body does not confer authorship over Blackness. And private participation in racialized sexual scripts does not make it harmless to carry those scripts into a username, a platform, a creative project or a relationship with another Black person whose labor is then expected to help furnish the identity.
I created graphics for a project connected to this person and a Black collaborator I knew at the time. One of those graphics has since been reclaimed and reused inside my own work. That detail matters to me because extraction is not always the dramatic theft people are trained to recognize. Sometimes it is a project that never becomes what it claimed it would be. Sometimes it is your imagination helping somebody else make their persona cohere. Sometimes it is labor offered inside presumed community until the inconsistencies become too loud to ignore.
This person lied about multiple things. When I confronted what I could see, I was not met at the level of fact. The Black person involved largely fell in line with the other person’s account, and the confrontation was translated into a story about my emotional condition. I was met with the language that “hurt people hurt people.”
But I did not know this person well enough to be heartbroken by them. I was being clear. I was being detailed. I was identifying behavior.
“Hurt people hurt people” was not care. It was a trapdoor. It moved the conversation away from what had happened and into a fantasy about why I must be saying it. It turned discernment into dysregulation. It made my supposed wound more discussable than their conduct. The person publicly wearing Blackness became vulnerable; the Black person establishing a boundary became dangerous.
This is one of the ways racial extraction protects itself. It psychologizes the witness.
Similar Is Not Shared
The later relationships entered through different doors, but I began to hear the same current underneath them.
These were people who found me, followed me and reached out to me. There was intensity because we could recognize certain neurodivergent experiences in one another. But similar situations were treated as though they were the same situation, and they were not. Neurodivergence does not dissolve race. Queerness does not flatten history. Shared difficulty does not create shared location. The nervous systems may rhyme while the bodies remain differently positioned inside the colonial world.
That difference becomes especially dangerous when Black-and-Brown solidarity is treated as an automatic condition rather than a practice.
“Black and Brown” can sound like a complete political relationship while hiding how differently groups are positioned in relation to Blackness, whiteness, immigration, labor, citizenship, desirability, respectability and cultural access. The phrase can create warmth before accountability. It can allow proximity to appear as kinship and marginalization to appear interchangeable. But being harmed by white supremacy does not prevent a person from extracting from Black people. Experiencing racism does not create an innocent relationship to anti-Blackness. Knowing exclusion does not mean somebody has learned how not to consume.
One person found me while their mental health was slipping in ways that looked similar to places my own mind had been. People somehow find their way into my space through that frequency even when we are not in the same place. But we were not in the same place. I had already healed and moved through much of what they were only beginning to discover. Recognition made the distance between us feel smaller than it was.
Nurturing is part of my creativity. It is one of the ways I make, imagine and enter relationship, so I welcomed them with open arms. I did not show up abstractly. I crossed country lines—not just state lines—to support them. I held what they were discovering. I made room for their emerging understanding of their own neurodivergence and mental health. We spoke about projects we would make together, and I treated those conversations as material commitments.
I put their name on my work.
On my work.
On work I made.
On ideas and structures I was developing through conversations that I can now see were connected to a much larger scale of thinking. Their contribution to what I was actually building was very, very minimal, but they were happy to let their name sit beside mine. They accepted the appearance of shared authorship without being honest about the size of what they had offered. And I was not being honest either—not about the work being mine, not about the imbalance I could already feel, and not about how readily my need to nurture could be recruited into making an unequal relationship look mutual.
That is different from saying I caused the extraction. My lack of honesty with myself did not manufacture their contribution. It helped me remain inside a structure that was already telling the truth: I was developing, carrying, crediting and crossing borders. They were receiving the shelter of a shared name.
I showed up for them fully. They showed up for me at the surface while accepting credit from the depths. We moved through an intensity sharpened by newly recognized neurodivergence, and I can now recognize that we should not have entered the relationship in the form that we did. But acknowledging that the container was unsustainable does not make the exchange symmetrical.
We may both have mistaken intensity for infrastructure. That does not mean we built the same amount, risked the same amount or took the same things from the collapse.
They grew rapidly on social media, reaching around twenty thousand followers through a public vocabulary shaped by Black Lives Matter, DEI and the claim that their work centered Black and Brown bodies. The performance was legible. The language traveled well. The platform expanded. But when I looked at how relationship was actually being practiced, it became clear that Black and Brown people were functioning more as the stated purpose of the work than as bodies with authority inside it.
This is how social media intensifies an older arrangement. The platform does not need someone to be in sustained relationship with Black people. It needs them to produce recognizable signs of concern. A person can learn the phrases, graphics, cadence, causes and confessional structure that make justice visible to an audience. They can transform public proximity to Black struggle into attention, authority and growth. If they are challenged, they can point back to the performance as proof of who they are.
The declaration becomes more credible than the relationship.
Meanwhile, the Black person who helped hold the work, supplied language, offered thought, imagined projects, absorbed intensity and believed the promise of reciprocity is left trying to explain a harm that does not look dramatic enough from the outside. There may be no stolen object. No single sentence that contains the whole betrayal. The extraction is atmospheric. It accumulates through attention, access, emotional labor, political credibility and unfinished promises.
Then the Black body closes the portal.
That is when the racial tantrum begins.
Not necessarily through screaming. Often it arrives through innocence. Confusion. Tears. Therapeutic language. Neurodivergence offered as a solvent. Marginalized identities gathered into a shield. The Black person’s boundary is treated as evidence that they have misunderstood the relationship, become unsafe or failed to extend sufficient grace. Intentions rise to the top. Impact disappears. Everything is discussed except the material fact that one person’s life, platform, identity or project expanded through access the other person provided.
The Black body is expected to understand everybody else’s complexity while being reduced to reaction.
The Culture Was Already for Sale
I am not outside this question.
My work centers Africa, African cosmologies and African states of living and being as I move toward embodiment. I know those tools can travel. I do not believe knowledge must remain sealed inside racial categories, and I am not interested in reproducing purity as a colonial border. Water moves. Sound moves. Plants move. Cosmologies move through people, land, rupture, memory and return.
But movement is not the same as free access.
Transmission must carry relationship with it. Lineage. Context. Attribution. Material reciprocity. The right of the source to establish limits. The willingness to remain accountable when the knowledge stops being exciting, flattering or useful. The understanding that engaging a cosmology does not make a person its owner, spokesperson or embodiment.
I have to remain cautious because Africa has already been constructed as an endless supply store: symbol, ritual, fabric, rhythm, ancestor, plant, mask, god, philosophy and aesthetic removed from particular peoples and offered to anybody seeking a more interesting self. My own Blackness does not excuse me from specificity. Diaspora is relationship, not total access. My work has to keep asking where something came from, how I am related to it, what rupture shaped that relation and what I owe because I have received it.
That responsibility is not the same as pretending every body stands in the same relationship to African knowledge. Nor will I confess myself into a false equivalence so that non-Black readers can avoid the critique. I am not borrowing Blackness to construct public proximity to Black people. I am a Black diasporic body attempting to return through what colonialism severed, while still being responsible for how I make that return.
The question is not whether knowledge can cross bodies. It already does.
The question is: What must cross with the knowledge so transmission does not become extraction?
The colonial world wants the knowledge to travel alone. It wants the song without the body, the movement without the history, the justice language without redistribution, the cosmology without lineage, the Black partner without Black communal accountability, the collaborator without their authority, the culture without the people saying no.
It wants Blackness infinitely summonable.
What Answered
The jinn in this essay is not an Asian femme. It is not a monster hiding inside a name. It is the concealed arrangement that traveled through more than one relationship before I could see its full shape. It is the force that made unequal exchange feel like shared marginalization. It is the colonial history inside the intimate room. It is the culture made public while its people remain disposable. It is the transformation of Black attention into somebody else’s proof of goodness, desirability, politics, depth or belonging.
The repeated jin helped me hear it.
Once in a username. Once in a name. Both times attached to people who approached me first. Both times surrounded by the language of affinity. Both times connected to an intensity that promised more relationship than the structure could hold. I am withholding their names because the names are not the argument. The pattern is.
I am also refusing the convenient story that these encounters were simply the result of manipulative individuals. Individual conduct matters, but colonial standards train desire. They teach people what can be taken, what can be worn, what can be monetized and whose refusal can be dismissed. East Asian cultures did not invent the global sale of Blackness. But proximity to whiteness, model-minority construction, global capitalism and anti-Black cultural appetite can create conditions in which Black culture feels fully available while Black people remain socially distant, erotically objectified or politically useful.
Asian American marginalization does not cancel that arrangement. Neither does Asian American participation in Black culture. Neither does interracial love. Neither does queerness. Neither does neurodivergence. None of those locations makes extraction impossible. Sometimes they are precisely the languages through which access is requested and accountability is delayed.
That is the tension I am naming—not an inevitable war between Black and Asian bodies, not a competition over who has been harmed more, and not a demand that cultures stop touching. I am naming the false intimacy produced when Blackness is already in the room as commodity before a Black person enters as a body.
They did not enter an empty room and discover kinship with me. Black people had already built the room, scored the music, furnished the language and been made to disappear inside it.
So when I arrived, the recognition could feel immediate. They knew the signs. They knew how to speak near my politics. They knew pieces of neurodivergence, queerness, art, survival and refusal. They could recognize what my work offered. But recognition of the material is not necessarily recognition of the maker. Desire for what moves through a Black body is not the same as capacity to hold that Black body in relationship.
And when the body speaks, the fantasy breaks.
When the body says the username is not innocent.
When the body says your intention is not the only evidence.
When the body says you built your public language through struggles you have not learned how to encounter privately.
When the body says neurodivergence may explain intensity but cannot make extraction mutual.
When the body says you do not have full access to me because you have learned how to perform access to Blackness.
That body is then described as the disturbance.
But perhaps I was not disturbing the relationship. Perhaps I was making the concealed arrangement perceptible. Perhaps the so-called instability was the sound of the structure losing access to what it assumed would remain available.
They were comfortable summoning Blackness.
They were not prepared for a Black person to answer.
Cosmos Watershed
This essay begins in Still Water, inside the pause required to recognize that similarity was never sameness. It enters Flowing Water through the global circulation of Black culture, from Japan and California to social media, kink culture and justice work. It descends into Deep Water, where nurturing, neurodivergent recognition and creative intimacy concealed an unequal relationship. Turbulent Water arrives when the Black body names the extraction and is recoded as unstable, hurt or harmful. Tidal Water reveals that these were not isolated betrayals but recurring returns of a colonial pattern. Sacred Water asks what must travel with knowledge, culture and intimacy so transmission does not become extraction.
Watershed
Watershed | Tributaries |
Watershed | The movement from concealed relational extraction into embodied discernment |
Relationship | Asian American proximity to Blackness; Black-and-Brown solidarity; neurodivergent intensity; racial-erotic identity; creative collaboration |
Hom(e)ie | Discernment—the Black body’s capacity to recognize when access is being mistaken for reciprocity |
Origin | An eighth-grade encounter with Blackness already circulating as spectacle and commodity in Japan |
Expansion | Irvine and hip-hop’s global circulation; “Afrobunny” as a public Instagram identity; kink and plantation choreography; creative labor and false shared authorship; justice language used to accumulate public legitimacy |
Application | Distinguishing similarity from shared location, intensity from infrastructure, access from relationship and transmission from extraction |
Lineage | Black diasporic memory; African cosmological accountability; Black queer refusal; the Black body as witness rather than commodity |
Counter Currents | Anti-Blackness; model-minority construction; racial fetishization; kink culture; social-media performance; therapeutic language used to psychologize Black discernment; neurodivergence used to flatten unequal racial locations |
The Six Waters
Water | Movement Through the Essay |
Still Water | The pause required to recognize that the relationships were never as mutual as their intensity made them appear |
Flowing Water | Black culture traveling through Japan, hip-hop, social media, sexuality, DEI language and interpersonal relationship |
Deep Water | Nurturing as part of creativity; crossing national borders; placing another person’s name on work; discovering the difference between emotional intensity and material contribution |
Turbulent Water | The moment factual confrontation is translated into Black instability, hurt, aggression or failure to offer grace |
Tidal Water | The pattern returning through distinct relationships without pretending those encounters were identical |
Sacred Water | Returning knowledge to lineage, context, attribution, reciprocity and the authority of the bodies from whom it came |
Cosmos Coordinates
Coordinate | Entry |
Planetary Body | Pluto |
Planet of Origin | Saturn |
Primary Water | Deep Water |
Secondary Water | Turbulent Water |
Movement | Integration |
Portal | Attention |
Primary Technology | Discernment |
Cosmological Function | Making the concealed colonial arrangement inside intimacy perceptible |
Core Inquiry | What must cross with knowledge, culture and intimacy so transmission does not become extraction? |
Threshold | The moment the Black body distinguishes being accessed from being held |
Black Ecological Orientation | Blackness is living terrain with memory, limits, lineage and authority—not an infinitely renewable cultural resource |
Calabash Relationship | The calabash holds knowledge together with its lineage, context, responsibility and material reciprocity; nothing enters or leaves as isolated content |
Wata(ring) W(hole) Relationship | The essay identifies a broken circulation: Black culture flows outward while recognition, credit, care and resources do not return to the Black body |
Return Practice | Audit who is named on the work, what they materially contributed, what crossed through the relationship and whether anything nourishing returned to its source |
Cosmos Constellations
Constellation | Connection |
Jin / jinn | A sound repeated inside a public username and a personal name opens the concealed arrangement without turning Asian people into mythological creatures |
The Furnished Room | Black people built the cultural environment, but Black authorship and authority were made to disappear inside it |
Afrobunny | A public Instagram username that advertised Blackness as racial-erotic identity rather than containing it within a private relationship |
Plantation Choreography | Sexual domination does not become historically neutral because its reenactment is described as consensual or personal preference |
Similar Is Not Shared | Neurodivergent recognition, queerness and racial marginalization do not place two bodies in the same colonial position |
Nurturing as Creative Technology | The desire to nurture is part of Kiing’s creativity, but it can be recruited into carrying relationships and projects that only appear mutual |
Intensity Is Not Infrastructure | Rapid emotional recognition cannot replace durable, reciprocal and accountable relationship |
Shared Authorship | Placing another person’s name on work can conceal who imagined, developed, carried and materially created it |
The Racial Tantrum | When Black access closes, innocence, therapeutic language and marginalized identity can be used to recode the Black boundary as harm |
Culture Travels Farther Than Accountability | Black aesthetics, politics and language circulate globally without corresponding recognition of Black authority |
The Black Body Answers | The body treated as cultural material returns as witness, boundary and source of meaning |
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