Introduction
Jamie McGhee’s speculative novelette “Skiinfolk,” published in Strange Horizons, arrives from a scholar-practitioner whose critical investments are unambiguous: her nonfiction monograph You Mean It or You Don’t: James Baldwin’s Radical Challenge signals a sustained commitment to interrogating how Blackness is constructed, contested, and policed in American culture. “Skiinfolk” transplants those theoretical preoccupations into near-future fiction, deploying the conventions of Afrofuturism and body-modification SF to dramatize a question that is neither futuristic nor speculative in the least: who has the right to inhabit Black skin, and who profits when that skin becomes a consumable aesthetic? The story follows Ogden, a young Black dancer in the fictional post-industrial city of South Grotto who is physiologically incapable of wearing the ubiquitous Augmented Skiin™ technology that allows users to replace their visible skin with any synthetic complexion, and who discovers that the celebrity he has fallen for—the publicly “skiinless” singer Laurence Laurens—has secretly modeled the first commercially viable “Black Skiin™” on Ogden’s own body without his knowledge or consent. This paper argues that “Skiinfolk” achieves its most significant literary work not through its satirical premise alone, but through its sustained, formally inventive exploration of the relationship between bodily autonomy, racial commodification, and the conditions under which self-acceptance becomes possible—conditions that, McGhee insists, cannot be manufactured, purchased, or bestowed by a charismatic savior.
Plot, Setting, and Character Summary
The story is set in a near-future America in which Augmented Skiin™ technology has become so normalized that appearing in one’s natural complexion—being “skiinless”—carries significant social stigma, particularly for Black Americans whose natural skin has no viable synthetic equivalent on the market. Ogden, the first-person narrator, is a twenty-something Black man living in South Grotto, an evidently working-class rust-belt city, who has been allergic to every aug he has tried since childhood. Unable to participate in the dominant aesthetic economy, he has channeled his dysphoria into competitive dance, working joyless motion-capture gigs while aspiring to professional performance.
The narrative is precipitated by a casting call from Laurence Laurens, a Black celebrity who has become nationally famous precisely because he performs “skiinless” and has built a public philosophy of natural Black beauty around the catchphrase “Black is bedazzling.” Ogden auditions and, despite exceptional dancing, is eliminated because his skin cannot produce the luminescent visual effects the lighting designers require. A chance encounter at a nightclub leads to an intense, unequal romantic entanglement with Laurence Laurens, during which Ogden is photographed, fed, clothed in African diasporic garments, and slowly drawn into the singer’s orbit—only to be ultimately passed over for the tour itself.
Weeks later, Ogden learns that Laurence Laurens has launched a line of Black Skiin™ augmentations, with the colorway “Mahogany Chestnut” corresponding precisely to Ogden’s complexion, including a distinctive mole on his left shoulder. The story’s climax reveals that Laurence Laurens is not Black at all, but a white man named Anthony whose father developed the Black Skiin™ technology using Ogden as an unwitting model. The denouement finds Ogden returning to a dance studio, finding community with a group of authentically Black dancers who initially distrust him, and arriving—through embodied movement rather than romantic validation—at the threshold of genuine self-acceptance.
Critical Analysis
Themes and Ideas
The story’s central thematic architecture rests on an extended and politically charged meditation on commodification. McGhee is working in a tradition of Black critical thought that includes Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the phenomenological violence inflicted upon the Black body by a white gaze that reduces it to spectacle (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) and bell hooks’s theorization of how Blackness is marketed as an “eating the Other” aesthetic experience for white consumers (Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1992). The Augmented Skiin™ technology literalizes what hooks describes as the white appropriation of Black culture as “spice” and “seasoning”—an exotic enhancement added to an otherwise bland dominant identity. When the bartender at Eagl tells Ogden that the Black Skiin™ will soon be “passé,” she is not merely commenting on fashion cycles; she is articulating the logic of commodified Blackness as trend, subject to market forces that render the bodies of actual Black people simultaneously hypervisible and disposable.
The story’s secondary thematic strand concerns the politics of Black authenticity and the dangers of charismatic respectability politics. Laurence Laurens functions as a figure in the tradition of what Patricia Hill Collins has called “controlling images”—idealized Black representations that serve the interests of dominant culture (Black Feminist Thought, 2000). His “Black is bedazzling” philosophy is not simply appropriated by Anthony/Blondie; it was constructed by him from the beginning. The revelation retroactively inverts every scene of Black affirmation in the story, converting them from moments of genuine solidarity into performances of manufactured Blackness. McGhee is acutely interested in the way that respectability politics—however sincerely articulated—can be detached from the bodies it claims to represent and sold back to those bodies at a premium. Laurence Laurens does not merely appropriate Black aesthetics; he profits from performing the fantasy of unself-conscious Black embodiment for an audience that cannot tolerate actual Black embodiment.
A third, subtler theme concerns interiority and the body. Ogden’s allergy to augmentation is the story’s central metaphysical conceit: the one character whose skin cannot be replaced is also the one whose skin is most violently extracted and reproduced by someone else. His body becomes the site of a dispossession that echoes the historical expropriation of Black bodily labor, beauty, and cultural production. Yet the story does not romanticize this dispossession as authentic suffering or redemptive martyrdom. Ogden’s self-loathing is rendered with unflinching honesty—he lies compulsively about his allergy, pursues Laurence Laurens with a need that shades into self-erasure, and uses both sex and alcohol as instruments of dissociation. McGhee refuses the narrative convenience of a trauma that ennobles; Ogden’s pain is ordinary and undignified and real.
Form and Style
“Skiinfolk” is formally unconventional in ways that are inseparable from its meaning. The story is organized not in numbered chapters or sections with headers but in brief, white-spaced vignettes separated by bullet points—a typographical choice that mimics both the fragmentation of Ogden’s selfhood and the scroll-aesthetic of social media, where identities are assembled from disconnected posts rather than continuous autobiography. Several of these micro-sections consist of a single repeated word (“I fall. / I fall. / I fall.”) or a single line of muted devastation (“Then the photo appears. •”), a technique that uses formal compression to communicate emotional overwhelm more efficiently than extended prose could.
The point of view is close first-person, but McGhee manages voice with exceptional discipline. Ogden’s narration is self-aware without being self-pitying in a way that alienates the reader; he knows he is lying when he says “I love my natural color,” and he knows the reader knows. This ironic self-knowledge creates a pervasive dramatic irony in the Laurence Laurens sections: Ogden is misreading every gesture of care as romantic sincerity when the reader—who has been primed by the genre conventions of the body-modification thriller—can sense the extraction underway. The climactic revelation scene is rendered in a hybrid form of prose and stichomythia, with Anthony’s defensive justifications set in plain text against Ogden’s fragmented questions, visually enacting the power imbalance and communicative breakdown between them.
McGhee’s imagery is organized around two competing semantic fields: skin/surface on the one hand, and light/color on the other. The first field encompasses the story’s political argument—skin as property, skin as commodity, skin as vulnerability—while the second enacts its emotional arc. When Ogden dances well, he feels like he is “glowing”; when he falls on the hotel rooftop, the repeated verb is stripped of all elaboration. The Skiin™ colorways are given names that blend the culinary (Cinnamon Bark, Bronze Tobacco) with the luxurious and the colonial (Taste of the Nile, Jungle Book Fever), a linguistic register that hooks directly into hooks’s “eating the Other” critique. The story’s most significant symbolic image is, of course, the mirror. Ogden opens by declaring that he would smash every mirror in the world; the story ends with him forcing himself to look at his own reflection. The mirror functions not as the Lacanian instrument of misrecognition (though that reading is available) but as the locus of a specifically racialized shame that must be confronted rather than shattered.
The tone oscillates strategically between satirical precision and genuine pathos. The scenes at Eagl, in which a once-exclusionary nightclub has become a theme park of performed Blackness—kente cloth on the walls, white patrons speaking fragments of “that one African language with the clicks”—are written with a sharp, almost journalistic dryness. The scenes of Ogden alone in his apartment, buried in sheets that still smell like Laurence Laurens, are tender and unguarded. McGhee refuses to allow the satirical register to anesthetize the reader to the human cost of the commodification she is depicting.
Characterization
Ogden is among the more fully realized protagonists in recent short speculative fiction, in large part because McGhee is unsparing about his flaws. He is self-deceptive, sexually transactional in moments of crisis, and possessed of a longing for external validation that makes him complicit—to a degree—in his own exploitation. His dance talent is not presented as redemptive in any simple sense; it is the one domain of his life in which he experiences embodied joy, but it is also the vehicle through which he is assessed, found wanting, and ultimately exploited. His growth across the story is not the arc of a triumphant hero but the quieter movement toward a willingness to inhabit his own reflection.
Anthony/Blondie/Laurence Laurens is a more schematic figure, but McGhee uses that schematism deliberately. He is most fully realized as an absence—his audition behavior, his staged generosity at Ola’s Nigerian Restaurant, his gift of the laminated tabloid photo are all coherent in retrospect as the performances of someone who has studied Black cultural expression without ever living inside it. His final deployment of the Georgia drawl to seduce Ogden back into forgiveness is the story’s most chilling moment precisely because it almost works, and because Ogden is lucid enough to recognize it as a performance and walk away anyway.
Kerstina, the Swedish dance instructor who adopts a Black Skiin™ by story’s end, functions as a complex comic-satirical figure. Her earlier assertion that she would “get a Black one because it is more interesting” is cringe-inducing but not cartoonish; she is genuinely well-intentioned within the limits of her obliviousness. Her transformation into a Skiin™ wearer at the climax is not presented as villainous but as a kind of structural inevitability—even the people closest to Ogden cannot resist the aestheticization of his skin once it has been made available to them.
Historical, Cultural, and Theoretical Context
“Skiinfolk” situates itself within a robust tradition of Afrofuturist fiction that uses speculative technology to defamiliarize present-day racial dynamics. As Kodwo Eshun has argued, Afrofuturism operates by extrapolating from the historical experiences of the African diaspora—particularly the experience of having one’s body treated as property and one’s cultural production treated as raw material—into speculative scenarios that make visible what is otherwise normalized (“Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 2003). McGhee’s Augmented Skiin™ technology belongs to a lineage that includes the racial passing technologies imagined in Nalo Hopkinson’s work and the biotechnological body politics of Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild sequence. The specifically digital-commodification dimension of the story—the way that Ogden’s skin is scanned, reproduced, and sold as a consumer product—connects it to contemporary critical discourse around data extraction, biometric surveillance, and what Ruha Benjamin has called the “New Jim Code,” in which technological systems reproduce racial inequity under the cover of neutral innovation (Race After Technology, 2019).
The story’s engagement with the Josephine Baker effect—the idea that a Black performer’s talent functions as an alibi for white tolerance of their Black body—draws on a long tradition of Black Atlantic performance theory. McGhee names this mechanism explicitly in the text, and the reference points toward Paul Gilroy’s theorization of Black music as a site of both diasporic solidarity and white appropriation (The Black Atlantic, 1993). The casting director’s demand for aug-enabled visual effects, and the subsequent discovery that the entire enterprise of Black celebration was funded and orchestrated by a white man in synthetic skin, dramatizes what Gilroy identifies as the structural asymmetry between Black cultural production and white cultural consumption.
The story is also in productive dialogue with recent speculative fiction that interrogates the performance of allyship. The white scholars in the story who declare that “the only way to analyze the Black body is to inhabit the Black body” are a direct satirical target, and McGhee’s critique here resonates with Robin DiAngelo’s analysis of how white engagement with anti-racism can become another form of white centering (White Fragility, 2018), though McGhee’s fictional mode allows her to take that critique further than a prescriptive nonfiction text can: Anthony has not merely centered himself in Black liberation discourse, he has literally put on Black skin and built a celebrity career and a commercial empire from it.
Evaluation
“Skiinfolk” is a formally accomplished and thematically serious work whose principal achievement is the integration of political argument and emotional texture. Many works of satirical speculative fiction sacrifice character interiority for conceptual elegance; McGhee maintains both. The story’s central metaphor—augmentable skin as the literal commodification of racial identity—is not subtle, but it does not need to be; the political argument is carried by the precision of its execution rather than the novelty of its premise.
The fragmented vignette structure is largely a strength, but the story’s middle section—the extended romantic entanglement between Ogden and the disguised Anthony—occasionally loses narrative momentum as a result of the very compression that distinguishes the opening and closing sequences. The ellipsis between Ogden’s third audition, the executives cooing over his skin, and the phone call informing him he has not been hired leaves the reader uncertain whether the executives’ admiration was always extractive or represented a genuine assessment interrupted by Anthony’s commercial calculations; a degree of additional scene-level development in this passage would sharpen the ethical stakes.
The characterization of Anthony is the story’s most significant limitation. While schematism is deployed deliberately, his psychology remains opaque in ways that are finally less suggestive than they are underspecified. His motives oscillate between genuine ideology (a belief that making Black Skiin™ available is politically progressive) and naked exploitation (the commercial empire he builds, the NDA he requires), and the story does not resolve this ambivalence into a coherent characterological portrait. This opacity is not, on balance, a fatal flaw—the story is Ogden’s, not Anthony’s—but it limits the weight of the final confrontation.
The story’s final image, in which Ogden forces himself to look at his own reflection and arrives at the formulation “Black is”—sentence incomplete, predicate withheld—is formally elegant and thematically precise. It refuses the narrative closure of triumphant self-love while insisting on the sufficiency of Black being as its own predicate. In refusing to complete the sentence that Laurence Laurens always completed for his audience, Ogden claims the right to leave meaning open, unperformed, and ungoverned by commercial affirmation. The moment is understated to the point of risk, but it earns its quietness.
Conclusion
“Skiinfolk” is a significant contribution to contemporary Afrofuturist short fiction and to the broader cultural conversation about racial commodification in an era of increasingly sophisticated aesthetic technology. By fusing the speculative body-modification scenario with a psychologically grounded character study and a structurally innovative formal design, Jamie McGhee produces a work whose political arguments are inseparable from their literary execution—which is, finally, the highest standard by which speculative fiction can be judged. The story’s thesis is as much performed as stated: that self-acceptance, for Ogden and perhaps more broadly, cannot be granted by a celebrity savior, cannot be produced by making one’s skin fashionable, and cannot be purchased at any price. It can only be arrived at through the body itself—through movement, through community, through the willingness, however reluctant, to look in the mirror.
The story invites further scholarly inquiry in several directions. A sustained comparative reading alongside Octavia Butler’s work on bodily autonomy and non-consensual transformation would illuminate McGhee’s place in the Afrofuturist tradition. The story’s treatment of digital extraction and biometric commodification positions it productively alongside Ruha Benjamin’s sociological work and could be productively examined through the framework of what Bernard Harcourt has called “the expository society” (Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, 2015). Finally, the story’s engagement with queer Black male embodiment and the specific vulnerabilities of queer desire to charismatic exploitation merits treatment through the lens of Darieck Scott’s theorization of Black abjection and erotic power (Extravagant Abjection, 2010). “Skiinfolk” is a story rich enough to sustain all of these approaches, and more.
Works Cited
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DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon Press, 2018.
Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 2003, pp. 287–302.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Grove Press, 1952.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Harcourt, Bernard E. Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Harvard University Press, 2015.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992.
McGhee, Jamie. “Skiinfolk.” Strange Horizons, 2024.
McGhee, Jamie. You Mean It or You Don’t: James Baldwin’s Radical Challenge. University Press, 2022.
Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York University Press, 2010.