There was a despicable attack perpetrated in New Jersey recently, where two boys, age 17, were arrested for urinating on a group of African-American schoolgirls and using racial epithets. You probably didn’t hear about it initially in the usual mainstream media outlets because the young men were described as being “of Indian descent.” (Doesn’t fit the media narrative.) Still, it was an awful incident.

But if you stayed tuned to the story for a bit longer, you did wind up hearing about it in an op-ed at the New York Times. Amazingly, while the incident was blamed on racism, the culprit was still identified as “whiteness.” (Free Beacon)

A New York Times op-ed Saturday made the case that a hate crime carried out by Indian-American teens on African-American girls proved that “whiteness evolves” and includes people of color. Police in Lawrence Township, N.J., arrested two 17-year-olds and charged them with several counts of harassment and bias intimidation after the pair allegedly urinated on a group of girls at a high school football game and called them the n-word. In a tweet, the police announced that both perpetrators were of “Indian descent.” In response, Princeton University professor emeritus of history Nell Irvin Painter penned a Times op-ed headlined, “A Racist Attack Shows How Whiteness Evolves.”

Yes, you read that correctly. This incident is an example of “how whiteness evolves.”

The op-ed is still available online and you can read it here. The author is a woman by the name of Nell Irvin Painter and she’s the author of a book called “The History of White People.” Or at least I hope she’s a woman. I’ll confess I didn’t check her pronouns first. And that distinction will become important in a moment because Ms. (Mx.?) Painter manages to draw a line between the behavior of these Indian-American youths and white people by claiming that race – much like “gender” according to the social justice warriors – is a “construct.” (Emphasis added)

While it’s tempting to see the reported ethnicity of the boys suspected in the assault as complicating the story and raising questions about whether the assault should be thought of as racist, I look at it through a different lens. Instead of asking what the boys’ reported racial identity tells us about the nature of the attack, we should see the boys as enacting American whiteness through anti-black assault in a very traditional way. In doing so, the assailants are demonstrating how race is a social construct that people make through their actions. They show race in the making, and show how race is something we perform, not just something we are in our blood or in the color of our skin.

See how easy that was? If non-white people engage in racist behavior, it’s easily explained. You see, they may not be “biologically white” by birth, but they are still white because they are acting like white people. It’s a genius concept!

You will notice, however, that this feat of verbal legerdemain only applies to white people. No white person doing anything out of the ordinary is ever “exhibiting blackness” or Hispanicness or Asianness. (My spell checker is having a fit with this paragraph so we should probably move on.)

Whiteness is amazing, isn’t it? It can be credited with virtually anything the imagination can conjure up. In case you missed John’s column on the subject yesterday, whiteness is also the reason we can assume that outer space, the planets, and the stars are all imaginary. You see, since only white people ever get to travel into space, other people have no reason to believe that such things exist because they’ve never seen them. (Spoiler alert: there have been quite a few black astronauts.)

That theory was put forward by a professor at Weber State University in Utah. And he doesn’t seem to be speaking facetiously. Whiteness can eliminate pretty much all of the known universe except for the parts of Earth that you’ve personally been to. Oh, and possibly the moon because everyone can see that.

So gender is a construct and now race is too. Exit question for Ms. Painter in case she happens to read this. Does this theory mean that everyone owes Rachel Dolezal an apology?