Since "Black" is now an ethnicity enshrined with a capital "B," and "black" as a color has been banished from the memory of enlightened society, it only stands to reason that "white" likewise means nothing anymore.
Look at it this way, color is either out or it's NOT. You can't have it both ways.
(Make up your mind.)
I say it's out.
So, I'm no longer "white."
And I never was, really! It was a mythical identity assigned to me at my birth. It has no basis in reality. The very idea of "color" is a social contrivance. Truly!
Snow is white. Milk is white. Crayons can be white. White whales are white.
But I'm not snow, milk or a crayon. Or a whale, though I have put on a bit of weight.
But me, I'm a human being. NOT white. What does "white" even MEAN, for Pete's sake?
Please.
So since it's all about ethnicity now, then I identify as Irish-American, thank you very much.
Perhaps you think I'm being snarky, mean-spirited, unhelpfully provocative, even racist.
Well, "balderdash, hogwash, tripe and drivel" on THAT, with all due respect. 😊
I'm entirely serious. I mean it.
In our day and age when every Tom, Dick and Harriet is entitled to "identify" him/herself, the glaring exception never given a choice is that phantasmic undifferentiated blob of a scapegoat called...absurdly..."white." Somebody branded you (possibly) as belonging to that fictitious undifferentiated blob the day you were born.
Well, I consider "Black's" official graduation from color to ethnicity to be MY official graduation out of the socioculturally contrived, oppressive language of color, too. My emancipation from the Blob.
Why not, I ask you! It's eminently, spectacularly consistent.
So listen, if you got gripes with "white people" (whoever, whatever, wherever that is), then you just go and try to find them/it, if you really want to hash it out. Good luck.
As for me, I'm Irish-American, and I have far better things to do than play along with such benighted myths in the service of despotic political philosophies.
Someone will still, I'm sure, insist on thinking I'm being sarcastic, acting out hostility to the "new rule" about "Black," or indeed to Black people!
If you do, whoever you are, you're simply not listening; your prejudices have clogged your ears. (Q-Tips might help. They're white, too, come to think of it. No, I'm not a Q-Tip, either.)
I couldn't be happier about the change. I embrace it utterly. My own "graduation" is part and parcel of that unqualified embrace.
"Free at last...."
Sincerely,
The Irish-American Formerly Known As White
The Irish-American Formerly Known As White
