It delights me to no end that we’ve finally hit the point in the idiocy that is liberalism where we can pick our own race, gender, and anything else in spite of reality. I was so tired of being just another white guy from Minnesota. That’s what I’ve been required to put on the forms since high school. In the wake of the controversy surrounding Elizabeth Warren and Rachel Dolezal, I’m finally free to just make stuff up and go with it for the big bucks.
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Once upon a time I was Hispanic. Truth. Got lots of college letters in Spanish, was offered scholarships for minorities, and I didn’t even lie on the paperwork that garnered me all of that lovely racially biased attention. I was just a 15 year-old kid who had a long name and really good test scores. You see, back in the dark ages (the 70’s) when you filled out computer forms for standardized testing, you were limited to a fixed number of spaces. My name, on one of those tests, came out like this: C O U R T E M A N C H E, J O S E. No room for the P H that would have finished the Wheel-of-Fortune phrase they were seeking.
Combine that with the urge to reward people for their skin color so that you can feel better about yourself, and I was in sweet clover. Sadly I had this thing called integrity. Nobody asked me to pony up any papers, but I knew I was pretty danged Caucasian so that whole thing wouldn’t work for me. I corrected their wild guesses and still managed to get a scholarship or two on offer.
The point of this little missive is that self-delusion and mental illness go hand in hand. You can claim to be from Zetox, but it doesn’t change the fact that you were born on this planet and aren’t green. I think it’s rather pleasant to identify with a number of other cultures and races. I’m delighted to have lived several interesting places. Picked up local habits and phrases. I like a variety of food and music. I’ve even been to a number of different religious services of various faiths. But I’m still Joe Courtemanche, the white guy from Saint Paul.
If you’re not happy with who you are, there are a lot of things you can change. One of the ones you can’t change, unless you like being branded a liar and whack-job, is your race. That one comes out of the box with a few notable exceptions. I will throw you the bone if you find out later in life that your race is different than you were raised to believe. Discovering that in your adult years could be daunting. But not for long, and only if you are race-focused. I’m not, and by golly that’s a blessing. (Was that “white” enough?)
I figure that who you are is more appropriately assessed by your actions than your skin color. Or lack of it. Or misunderstanding of it. (If I end enough sentences with the word “it” I know I can cause at least five heads to explode.) To quote a man whom I respect quite a bit, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Amen, Reverend.
Now, pass the home-made guacamole and the kimchi – I’m starving.
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We have been “passing” for eons. In one way or another. We can self identify as pretty much, whatever we want. All you have to do is check out the hot news stories of the day. Pick a sex, pick a color, it’s all up for grabs. Personally, I would like to self identify as a white rhino so I can move in to the San Diego Zoo and they will provide my health care for free. Free everything even, food, housing, the whole enchilada.
And speaking of enchiladas, remember back a few decades when the politically correct way to ask people to identify themselves as Latino was a little box that said, “Mexican American Surname”? Back then affirmative action had some powerful juju. I knew no less than three employees of a certain corporate entity who changed their last name to something that could be said to be Latino. Just so they could check that little box. And one of these people was of Scandinavian heritage and was possibly the whitest person I have ever known. It paid off big time for all three of them. And it wasn’t a lie, they did legally have a “Mexican American Surname”. So why wasn’t this a big deal? Maybe because it was never publicized and these folks flew quietly under the radar. Perhaps it stayed quiet because we didn’t have the internet to speed the news around the world in nanoseconds.
I knew two other people who did this too. One used it to get into medical school and one for dental school. And their last name bought them full ride scholarships. Today there is at least one doctor and one dentist who owe their entire careers to that one little box.
Maybe it wasn’t ethical but it was legal. I don’t know but maybe it’s not ethical to hand out promotions or educational opportunities based on ethnicity either. Whenever there is a distinct advantage to being one flavor over another, people will “pass”.