When I was in high school and 'Atomizer' lived in the cassette deck in my car, I thought that this was a piece of speculative fiction about somebody whose complexion was not stable—whose racial identity was "passing," i.e., shifting back and forth between black and white in such a way that he could be said to be neither. That kind of abject experience of race—not white, not black, fleetingly both, but ultimately neither—felt very Big Black to me. Of course, I later learned what passing really meant, but I still kind of like my youthful misapprehension of the lyrics.
When I was in high school and 'Atomizer' lived in the cassette deck in my car, I thought that this was a piece of speculative fiction about somebody whose complexion was not stable—whose racial identity was "passing," i.e., shifting back and forth between black and white in such a way that he could be said to be neither. That kind of abject experience of race—not white, not black, fleetingly both, but ultimately neither—felt very Big Black to me. Of course, I later learned what passing really meant, but I still kind of like my youthful misapprehension of the lyrics.