by A White Man

From time to time, but mostly on Fridays, when we’re tired, The Awl gives over its editorial space to everyday citizens with a point of view. Opinions do not reflect yadda yadda, disclaimer disclaimer.

What the CNN says, for once, is true, buddy: We white folk, which is to say, non-Italians and non-Jews who look like white people, have on the front of their heads the new faces of racial discrimination. And everyone knows it: “A recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found 44% of Americans surveyed identify discrimination against whites as being just as big as bigotry aimed at blacks and other minorities.” Finally someone said it, and when the ladies at the DMV are done being upset about this, we can finally talk about it, person to person. Racism against white people, it is definitely just as “big” as the racism that faces the Orientals and the wetbacks. It’s like as big as a whole house! A really big house, like a plantation or something.

Now I know that the Mexicans are on the rise or whatever, and that now they are being elected mayors of some of our cities that are closer to the wasteland that is Mexico. And as I’m becoming a minority, frankly, I am pants-crappingly concerned about this. When you put a beaner in office, first thing that happens is the public schools start serving tacos and then next thing you know, it’s Spanish for everyone. Even in the math class! How can you teach algebra in Spanish, I ask you. Numbers? They’re in American! How are you supposed to talk math without American numbers?

So the blacks are having all the babies, so the white people are disappearing, and so soon it’ll be Monday Night Basketball, which I don’t enjoy particularly, and I’ll just have to stay home and find something to watch upon the teevee, which will perhaps be golf, a sport not that taken over yet by foreign nationals and the Chinese.

I must say, however, this whole “whiteness studies” up in the universities that the CNN is talking about as a way to measure embattled sensations of whiteness sure sounds interesting. I bet it’s totally about just studying things that are white and neat (like Lynyrd Skynyrd?), and totally not at all about the history of colonialism and white privilege, which doesn’t exist of course. And I’m sure Critical Whiteness Studies is just like a hopped-up version of white studies, like a Trans Am with another Trans Am inside it, not like some pinheaded way of investigating how the law has been used over time to manipulate white people into near-total power.

Fortunately we are beginning to offer these whites-only scholarships, to redress the balance. Everyone knows that “need-blind” is just a code-word for “poor Asians with great test scores.” That the vast, vast, vast majority of financial aid for college in this country has nothing to do with ethnic or racial background, well, hooey, how could that be true! I am sure that it’s just because white people don’t do as well on standardized tests, because they’re biased (so many questions about frijoles and whatnot) and this discrimination means that white people are being kept out of America’s finer universities, also because their grades are also worse than darker students, who study harder. Except at Cornell! And the University of North Carolina in Asheville. Very white. Statistically strangely white. God bless!

A White Man lives and works surprisingly near you, and is busy talking about how Obama is Kenyan, and may in fact be related to you by blood.