There Are No White People
A Counter-Spell
At First Sight
This essay is an attempt to see with my own eyes, rather
than with other people’s lies. Seeing as you are told to see is socially
convenient, but it is illusion, which leads to suffering. Seeing with your own
eyes will make you suffer right away, but only from mental exertion.
Therefore this essay is idiotically literal-minded. In it,
I pay close attention to a trivial visual detail. My aim is optical precision.
I do so out of respect for reality. The philosopher Voltaire said that those who
can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. This essay is
an attack on one of those absurdities.
Fifty Shades Of Brown
The
atrocious absurdity mocked here is belief in the existence of white people. For
have you ever actually seen a white
person?
Before
you answer, please remember that this essay is idiotically literal-minded; so
by “white”, I mean the same color as clouds, paper, snow, cotton, and milk. By
‘white’ I mean white.
By
this optically-precise standard, I am confident that your skin is not white. If
you put your hand on a sheet of blank white paper, then it will stand out, for your
hand and the paper are not the same color.
I
am also confident that if you investigate further, as I have, then you will see
that there are no white people, anywhere. There are plenty of people called white, but that is a misnomer.
Viewed
with scientific objectivity, people of European ancestry have a skin with a
complex tint. It contains bright red from arterial blood, blue from veins,
yellow from subcutaneous fat, and brown from melanin. The color is definitely
not white; but what to name it?
This
chromatic question so perplexed me that I sought help from an artist. So I
visited Katherine McKay, several of whose luminously beautiful paintings I now
have the honor to own. I pointed to the back of my left hand and asked, “What
color is this?”
Her
answer: “A light warm shade of brown.”
Brown!
Just the right word. I have since seen, with my own eyes, that normal human
skin varies from dark brown to light brown; teak to bamboo. If you wrote with ink
the color of Louis Farrakhan on paper the color of Patrick Buchanan, then you’d
have to squint to read what you wrote; for they’re both shades of the same
color: brown.
It’s
true that there is some variation away from normal brown. There are albinos,
who are pink. Some people are blue, due to blood defects or overuse of silver-based
medicines. There are even orange people, such as John Boehner and Donald Trump.
But these exceptions are neither white, nor a ‘race’.
Not
only is ‘race’ a genetic exaggeration, it isn’t even about skin color. It’s about skin tint.
And
just how much respect does white racial supremacism deserve, if race is bogus,
supremacy is lawless, and white people don’t even exist?
Politics
Of Illusion
Maybe
this essay’s literalism annoys you. So what if “white” people aren’t really
white? Must we adopt some correct but clumsy term? “Caucasian”, perhaps? “European-American”?
How inconvenient! “White” is such a short, simple word; it takes so little time
and thought to say; so won’t it do?
No,
it won’t. Consider this riddle, one told by Abraham Lincoln:
Suppose you call a tail a leg. How many legs does a
dog have?
Answer:
Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make
it a leg.
Likewise,
I say: calling people white doesn’t make them white.
Dear
reader, I urge you to see with your own eyes, rather than with other people’s
lies! For whiteness is a lie. It supports the pseudoscience of race and the
tyranny of supremacism, and it is itself an illusion. Anyone who sees white
people is literally hallucinating.
Racism
requires such hallucinations, for race does not exist. Race is an exaggeration.
It is a genetic tan. It’s skin-deep. It is no more than a tribal signifier; and
tribalism fights for symbols, not realities.
Humankind’s
skill at manipulating symbols leaves us vulnerable to being manipulated by our own
symbols. It is a kind of magic spell that we can cast upon ourselves; hatred by
hypnosis.
How
to dispel such ensorcelment? This essay proposes an aesthetic antidote and a
moral tactic. The aesthetic antidote is optical precision. Mark Twain defined the
moral tactic with this aphorism:
One
horselaugh is worth a thousand syllogisms.
The Milk Test
If, despite your eyes, you still believe that there are
white people, then consider this scenario:
David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, is told
that there are two glasses in the room next door; that he may drink what he
wishes, but he is warned that one of those glasses is full of milk, and the
other is full of paint.
In the next room there are indeed two glasses with two liquids.
In one glass, the liquid is the same color as snow. In the other glass, the
liquid is the same color as David Duke.
From
which glass would David Duke drink?
The
snow-white glass, of course; that’s the one full of milk. The Duke-colored
glass must be full of paint, not milk; and that’s because milk is white, and David
Duke is not white.
What’s
more, he knows that he isn’t white.
There are other versions of the milk test. For instance, if
a cloud floated overhead, and it were the same color as you, and it dropped snow
the same color as you, then would you go out and play in that you-colored snow?
And maybe taste some of it? Or would you instead hide indoors, and call the EPA
to report an environmental disaster?
White
People That I Have Seen
I myself have seen white people; but they were always
fictional.
Consider Boris Badenov and his sidekick Natasha Fatale. They’re white! Look at Caspar the
Friendly Ghost; he’s white all over!
But they don’t count because they’re animated cartoons.
The
Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man starred, alongside Bill Murray, in a blockbuster
movie. He’s white! But he’s a special
effect.
Take
Nosferatu. He’s white. Or the Borg. They’re white. But really they’re all
actors wearing white grease-paint. Mimes don’t count as real white people, for
the same reason.
One
Halloween, I saw a man dressed as the Pillsbury Doughboy. He was wearing white
shoes, white pants, a white shirt, and a white chef’s hat; and he had white
grease-paint on his hands and face. Even his lips were white. A truly spooky
Halloween fake!
How
about Frosty the Snowman? Here’s a song, sing along:
Frosty
the Snowman was a frozen golem freak;
He
was so uncanny-valley that he made the children shriek.
Frosty
the Snowman, he would joke and jump and dance
And
do other undead antics that made children wet their pants.
Frosty
the Snowman would affright you at first sight
For
like Boris, Caspar and the Borg, he was snowy, creepy white.
Frosty
the Snowman had a tint so twee you’d wince
He’s
the one white man I’d ever seen, and I haven’t seen one since!
Metamorphosis
One
morning, when Richard Spencer awoke from troubled dreams, he found himself
transformed in his bed into a white man.
The back of his hands were white. White, as in cloud-white,
paper-white, snow-white, cotton-white, milk-white. White white. So were the palms of his hands. So were his arms, his
chest, his stomach, his thighs, his shins and his feet.
“What
has happened to me?” he thought. It was no dream. He bolted out of bed and ran
to a mirror. In it he saw that his face was white and his hair was white. So
were his eyebrows, his irises, his lips and his tongue.
He pulled out his waistband, and looked down, and yes, even
little Richard was as white as a sheet of paper.
He called for an ambulance. It took ten minutes to arrive,
which seemed like forever. The driver took one look at him and ordered him into
the wagon. The ambulance hurtled to the hospital, sirens screaming, blowing
past stop signs and red lights. It screeched to a halt at the entrance to the Emergency
Room.
The nurse in attendance took one look at Richard Spencer
and waved him in, past all the other patients. While filling out the form she
said, “Whoo-ee! Ain’t ever seen a white
man before!”
The nurses led him to a bed and attached sensors to him.
They took a blood sample, a urine sample, and a stool sample. All three were white.
As nurses and interns crowded around Richard Spencer, three
of the doctors walked over to a corner to quietly confer.
Rex Morgan, MD, said, “I have never seen a case like this.”
Dr. Kildare said, “Nor have I.”
Dr. House said, “Idiopathic symptomology. Diagnosis?”
Rex Morgan said, “He’s... white?”
Dr. House said, “Cause?”
Dr. Kildare said, “Unknown.”
Dr. House said, “Treatment?”
Rex Morgan said, “Unknown.”
Dr. House said, “Prognosis?”
Dr. Kildare and Rex Morgan looked at each other. Rex Morgan
shrugged. Dr. Kildare slowly shook his head.
