Illustration : Sam Woolley ( GMG )

My eyes have seen some pretty damn white things.

I once saw a single speck of pepper on top of a presumably seasoned chicken breast placed on my plate at a white person’s wedding in 2003. When I quickly glanced into the serving tray to see if, perhaps, this single peppered breast was rogue, an anomaly that managed to escape from his appropriately seasoned brethren, I saw that the pepper-speck-to-breast ratio in the entire tray was perhaps 1.002 to 1.


And just to make sure it wasn’t a mistake—maybe someone mixed up the labels and the “seasoned breasts” were really the “plain breasts”—I looked in the plain-chicken-breast tray. And they were, in fact, so devoid of pepper that a pepper-based tumbleweed brisked past me. Disappointed and disgusted, I put the breast back and just filled my plate with Jello.

Just two weeks ago, I saw two women in a coffee shop with identical bark-brown Patagonia pullovers standing in front of me in line. Apparently they’d met each other that morning at a march, saw that they were wearing the exact same pullover, both thought it was the funniest thing ever, struck up a conversation, learned they lived on the same block and walked together to the coffee shop. And I know all of this because they shared this information with the barista, who then also shared that he has a similar pullover, except his has lime green accents.


I also saw The King’s Speech and several other movies starring Colin Firth.

Usually, when determining an item’s level of whiteness, it must go through an extensive vetting process. A committee is consulted, a rubric is considered, texts are cited and someone makes a call to Viola Davis (not for any particular reason—we just like to have her around when these decisions are made).

Sometimes the entire process can take months—years, even, as was the case when we decided whether March or October is the whitest month (it’s March).

But while the Boston-based Bar Mezzana’s Avocado Toast Cocktail is a relatively new invention, the whiteness of it is so clear and sheer and boundless and stark that it was able to bypass the committee. On the 19-level scale of caucasity, it scores a whopping 16! It puts an even whiter spin on the already aggressively white avocado toast, which is like Tomi Lahren using skin-bleaching cream. It somehow includes kale, which is both an insane and insanely obvious ingredient. It was even created in Boston by a person named “Ryan.”


The only thing keeping it from the pinnacle is that nothing was colonized in its creation. Buuuuuuut ... the best avocados are from Mexico, so there’s colonization potential there. Shit, I’ll be back. This needs to go to the full committee. It might actually merit top-level consideration.