In his excellent essay in this collection, the Blackness of the Panther, Teju Cole asks: what’s a black panther, anyway? It isn’t a species. It’s a black jaguar or a black leopard. Blackness is “melanistic variants”, Cole explains, in a big cat’s coat color. As a Nigerian immigrant to America, it’s in his new home that he’s called, for the first time, black. It was never a descriptor in Lagos. The American immigrant experience necessarily involves labels, and this can feel blanketing and erasing. It’s bad enough that we are immigrants, we are also – particularly if we are immigrants of colour – put into broad and limiting categories: “black” to describe a multitude of experiences, “Asian” to lump together whole countries and cultures, “brown” even more obliquely. To whom are these categories convenient?