Ask a white person: Is this racist?

White people

White people

Smick sent me a link to this long essay ostensibly by a teacher at a predominantly black high school, supposed to have first appeared in the Rants & Raves section of Mobile, Alabama Craigslist. It appears all over the internet with that attribution, although the original has yet to be found. It reached Smick via a chain email, and he sent it to me with the possibly facetious question, “Is this racist?” Spoiler alert: yes, the essay is extremely racist. Besides repeatedly using the phrase “the blacks,” it also contains this paragraph:

One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example.

Bob Parks described it as “the kind of truth that is often taken back out of PC fear.” He would have sourced it better, but his nephew was visiting him at his cabin.

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