I’m White. Hell, I Glow in the Dark
If you have to say “I’m not a racist” after giving a speech, then maybe you are. Well, that’s not true – you definitely are.
Please meet Mike Congressblubberingidiot Mike Kelly. Mike wants to talk about people of color because he appears to be an expert on the matter.
“You know, they talk about people of color. I’m a person of color. I’m white. I’m an Anglo Saxon. People say things all the time, but I don’t get offended. With a name like Mike Kelly you can’t be from any place else but Ireland.’”
If you’re Irish, you’re not Anglo Saxon. You are Celt with a little Scandinavian Viking mixed in. So find yourself a sturdy woman and take to the ocean, Mike.
You’re not a “person of color” because you’re white. Technically, by definition, white is the absence of color. You’re more like the damn mole people.
I know life has been tough on Mike because he’s white. After graduating from Notre Dame University, he inherited his dad’s successful Cadillac dealership. He didn’t have to sit on the back of the bus because he never rode the damn bus.
Mike is the problem with America. Old white men of privilege who don’t want to give up power. They were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
We’re still trying to figure out where my spousal unit and I would ‘go home’ TO….He’s Scot + Native American…talk about split continents!
I’d have no home, of course. I’d have to roam around between England, Scotland, Spain, France, and Italy.
1Yesterday a good friend of mine (and the only other Democrat I know in this town) was having lunch with two other women at a local restaurant. A grizzled old guy stopped at their table and asked them “Isn’t white a color?” several times. My friend told him in no uncertain terms to leave them alone and he finally left after shouting that a white man had freed the slaves. My friend was extremely upset but her table mates couldn’t see the problem. My friend had worked for years at a church run preschool in Houston that was staffed about 98% by black women who became her dearest friends, besides being wonderful co-workers. She was so upset by what Trump has wrought that she went home and cried. She didn’t know which thing was worse: what the man said or the puzzlement of her white friends who couldn’t understand why it was such a big deal to her.
2Explaining “White Privilege” to this fool is the definition of “Exercise of futility.”
3Like Hussy #2, I would have to wander around northern France and Germany – actually it doesn’t sound too bad!
Fareed Zakaria interviewed a bunch of people who also weren’t racists and it was amazing to hear them describe who was “white” and who wasn’t. One guy had an advanced degree from Harvard and he thought Ashkenazi Jews were white but Sephardic were not. This is how into racism people are!
4My nana from the hills of Naples thought Irish people weren’t white- not even people, actually. She cried when her two sons married Irish women. (Papa just said, if you can’t be Italian you might as well be Irish.) Now their great, great grandchildren are Asian, south Asian, Native, black- and a whole lot of Irish. A more beautiful bunch of kids you’ve never seen.
5Mcaleenan testifies Now @12:30 House hearing on child separation policy.
https://www.reuters.tv/l/PGIb/2019/07/18/mcaleenan-testifies-on-child-separation-policy
6Whenever I get a questionnaire about race, I check off “Other”
7I consider myself a member of the human race-period.
I am not an artist, so I’m a little fuzzy on how color combinations work.
But as I recall my Physics, white is all the colors mixed. And painter friends tell me you mix colors to get black. So unless you’re transparent, yes, you’re colored. We all are. So one color should be just as “good” as another. But most people who understand History know that hasn’t been the case, and a LOT of people have died as a result.
And that is the truth that Hair Furor and Faux Corp is trying to repackage as simple disloyalty and discontent. But the truth is still, lots of people have died just because of colors and the need for distinction.
Maybe the arguments about the colors of souls should be reframed as having one, or not…
8I, too, am so white I glow in the dark. JJ, you are right; my ancestors were not Anglo-Saxon, but Celtic. He needs to know the difference and he doesn’t. It would help him with people of “other cultures” if he knew his own.
9Since when has anyone ever voluntarily given up power? Unless it was to a successor or something, and that’s the same thing. Someone is favored and that’s who gets the cheese.
The only way for those with no power to get power is to take it.
Unfortunately. That’s the way of the world.
10Let me see, my mother’s family were English-born who settled in Canada and then walked across the border to New York state. I don’t think Canada would let me live there unless I married a Canadian.
The Irish half of my father’s family came here in the late 1850s. They were scorned for being Irish and took the only jobs they could get such as cleaning horse manure from streets, doing laundry and working in slaughter houses. I have an irish maiden name, but the Irish might not want me either.
The German half of my father’s family came to America by way the Netherlands in circa 1690 from Strasburg, France after Louis IV revoked the Edict of Nantes and began burning Protestants out of their homes. I don’t think Germany would want me either.
Hussy @ #1,
I guess I’ll have to go to Europe, buy a camper and become an expat vagabond, too.
I think the other 2/3 of Americans who are appalled by Rump’s racist rants should be in the streets raising hell…jmo.
11“Isn’t white a color?”
“Isn’t that a pointless question?”
12(Then add, it’s rhetorical, for some gratuitous confusion)
I don’t disagree with your point, but from a physics perspective, black is the absence of color. Black absorbs all color and thus is the absence of color.
13Tom, that’s the problem with science – it can just ruin a good story. 🙂
14If I had some of Kelly’s DNA — I know, yuch — I’d pay to get it analyzed by ancestry.com. He might be surprised to learn that many Irish have Spanish ancestors (sailors who survived the destruction of the Armada and were welcomed in Catholic Ireland), who in turn had Moorish ancestors. In short, Mike, you are indeed a “person of color”: you’re a little bit Ay-rab. Salaam aleikum, Congressman!
15I read somewhere (maybe Smithsonian mag) that human skin color is a tiny fraction of 1% of genes in all human DNA.
Don’t tell that to their MAGAt’s, their tiny under developed brains might explode from a fact.
16The sad part of this is that being white is not the absence of color but all the colors go into white light – hence the rainbow. One would hope that if we are born rainbows we would act more like we are truly related to everyone else. I argued with my aunts, uncles, cousins, more immediate family, heck, I yelled at times – but they seem to love me just the same. Maybe because they knew that I knew that I was no better nor worse than them. Republicans seem to think they are demi-gods and the rest of us are algae. Just needed to vent. Thanks Juanita.
17Mike @ 7, my experience has been that people who say that are blinded by white privilege. I done know you, but I’m skeptical. ….
18djw@17
I consider all people members of the human race except maybe anyone in the Trump maladministration-those I consider members of the species homo idioticus.
19Buttermilk Sky @15,
That ‘Spanish Armada survivor’ theory has been pretty well discredited, but there were maritime trading and fishing ties between what is now Ireland and Spain, the Basques [who are genetically close to the Irish], Portugal, the Roman Empire, and many others stretching back eons.
Mr. Kelly is just showing his ignorance.
Ireland, like all of Europe, has been mixed by dozens of genetic populations over the last 20 thousand years or so; with notably little Anglo-Saxon influence.
The Celtic and Gaelic history, like all the rest of human groups, is very ‘complicated’.
It just depends on which era you pick. Going back from recent British/English domination [themselves mongrels], there was admixture with Picts, Normans, Bretons, Norse Viking predations and settlements, Roman invasion [but not conquest], and many other blendings.
The whole thing is ridiculous.
[Hell, most of my own recent grandkids have been coming out looking like little Vikings, the most blondest-blue-eyed darlings around our family trees, and their ancestry is very definitely mixed [ex/grandmom is def Mex-Am, but DNA test said ~lots of Irish/Scot/whatever, so WTF?]. One dad has Scots ancestry, the other’s is Iberian, so who knows how the genetic dice roll…]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaels
20Just run some white light, sunlight, through a PRISM. What do you get?
21Kelly is a walking colostomy bag.
22Just one correction to your piece. By definition and physics, black is the absence of color, white is actually a combination of all colors. So I hate to say it, but the congressvarmint is correct. He just might be surprised to see all the colors he consists of.
23Race is a totally artificial construct that has no basis in biology.
24Mike, Mike, Mike! C’mon now! I know you’ve heard of black Irish!
25Mike Kelly went to Notre Dame, knows he’s Irish, and still thinks he’s Anglo-Saxon? There may be a smidge or two there, but likely a whole lot more Celt, and a chunk of Viking. Don’t they teach history at Notre Dame? How on earth did he graduate?
26Only his hair is white as far as I can see.
27Kelly is a very specific shade of white.
I call it Half-Baked Cracker.
28