Politics Of Illusion
Maybe this essay’s absurd 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. Here’s a 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.
How spooky, that race doesn’t exist, but racism does; and that the favored race doesn’t exist either. Because nobody is really white, nobody can be white enough. What a scam! And after everything that the world has done for white people, they don’t even have the common courtesy to exist!
Humankind’s skill at manipulating symbols leaves us vulnerable to being manipulated by our own symbols. Thus we can be ruled by illusions. 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.
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