white people
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Hair-Dryer-Roasted Chicken Wins the 2018 Award for the Whitest Thing on the Internet
In a ceremony televised on Fox News and the Food Network, the New Yorker’s “roving food correspondent” Helen Rosner was awarded the 2018 “I Was Told by AppleCare” prize for Unapologetic Whiteness. In a story titled, “Yes, I Use a Hair Dryer to Make Roast Chicken” (which insinuates that at least one person asked her,…
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The ‘Dread Train,’ Where (White) People Tie Their Dreadlocks Together, Is More Proof That White People Must Be Stopped
If you’re as big a fan of True Romance as I am—and consider it, as I do, the quintessential Tony Scott film—perhaps you’ve imagined how it would look if Drexl (the dreadlocked pimp played by Gary Oldman) and Floyd (the perpetually stoned roommate played by Brad Pitt) decided to clone themselves a dozen times, and…
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Why Are White Men So Angry?
Of course, this is a question that has been asked (and answered) myriad times already—particularly when another Charlottesville, Va., happens, or another Mark Anthony Conditt or Adam Lanza or Dylann Roof or Stephen Paddock decides, with no clear provocation, to weaponize his anger and murder people. These are men who exist in a country where…
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Days Black People Are Most Likely to Be Called the N-Word, Ranked
1. St. Patrick’s Day 2. New Year’s Eve 3. Wednesday (any) 4. Columbus Day 5. The anniversary of the O.J. Simpson verdict 6. MLK Day 7. The night of a presidential election 8. Memorial Day 9. Mardi Gras 10. Black Friday 11. Saturday (any) 12. The Fourth of July 13. The first of the month…
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Why I Don’t Have Any White Friends, Explained
Huh? It was when I was 17: The Pittsburgh Zoo made this big stink about getting a polar bear—press releases and parties and polar-bear-themed brunches and shit—despite the fact that they already had perfectly fine (and strikingly handsome) black and brown bears. I saw that as a metaphor for America, and I pledged to never…
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Betsy DeVos Is the World’s Most Useless White Woman
Of course, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is not the world’s most useless white person. That title belongs to sentient-pile-of-shredded-Monopoly-money-lining-an-albino-hamster’s-cage Jared Kushner, who has somehow managed to stay dead in the center of every Trump-related scandal despite the fact that no one knows what he does or did before whatever he’s doing now, or even what he…
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Common Has Secured the Bag and Now He Just Makes Dad Rap
Common is killing the game; or, in today’s parlance, Common has secured the bag. I’m almost 40 years old, which means that I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s listening to Common (née Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr.) when he was rapping about watermelons and communism and asking to borrow a dollar. I still own…
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Is ‘Colonizer’ the Best Word for Problematic White People Ever?
The search for the perfect slur for white people has been relentless, exhausting and mostly fruitless. There are dozens of contenders, but none that have ever truly stuck. Basically, the search for the perfect slur for white people has been like the search for a really good fast-food fish sandwich. “Cracker” is perhaps the most…
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America Doesn’t Have a Gun Control Problem. We Have a White-People Problem
Last August, as my wife and I and two of our friends biked through the Great Allegheny Passage in McKeesport, Pa., a city 12 miles from Pittsburgh, I joked that we probably wouldn’t see any more black people until Maryland. I was wrong. In the 150 miles between Pittsburgh and Cumberland, Md., we saw four.…