Virginia Dare

I'm not supposed to admit this, but white people aren't actually magic. And if there's a determined conspiracy out there to prop up Honkitude at the expense of the brown man, I certainly haven't been invited to the meetings. I think a lot of the freak-out amongst pale-skins in post-racial America is that all white people are painfully aware of this fact. The psychological trauma of this unhidden truth comes with the realization that the things it seems most like we have a particular aptitude for--and I'm talking here about the directed exploitation of peoples of non-European cultural proclivity and perhaps visibly overtaxed in the melanin department--we're pretty sure just about anyone else could just as well if not better.

This only really becomes troubling when suddenly there are more of them than there are of you. It's frightening enough to be faced with the reality that only 50% of our current presidents are white. Now there's a very real demographic component to go with the institutional one.

Even now, though, the problem remains a theoretical one as the Gathering Brown Horde is mostly in the form of bendy, slobbering infants. But it's only a matter of time before that group grows up, en masse, into something totally unintelligible to modern white America: multilingual. Self-motivated. Achieving without privilege. Most likely raised, for some period of their childhoods, in the kind of poverty even children can comprehend, so lacking the massive burden of smug entitlement most of us spend much of our free time admiring in the handy storage compartment we keep it in, up our own asses.

I get the panic. This is the last thing America needs. If you consider that a good 60% of our gross domestic product is currently wrapped up in "reality" television tracking botox-dependent glambots meeting with their scent stylists ahead of the launch of their fragrance line, we're talking about a real economic crisis in the offing.

I don't see any way out of it in the short term, though. We've tried making it unpleasant for them by happily ceding the entire laboring-class sector and then sometimes kind of being dicks. And yet they insist on coming and staying. I suspect it's either the quiet stoicism of basic human dignity in the face of so much condescension. Or maybe just that they've really really considered the alternatives.

Look, we've faced this problem before. Remember what a big deal it was to face down wave after wave of smelly Eurotrash Catholics, like the Italians and the Irish? Sure, we imported some of their less savory traditions like racketeering and institutionalized church-sanctioned child rape (respectively), but some of us get Columbus Day off and who doesn't like a green beer every now and again?

Going even further back, there was a time when the birth rate issue was stacked against us at just about 100%. But we chipped away and, with just a little elbow grease,* the Protestant work ethic** and good ole American stick-to-it-iveness,*** we wrestled the burden of control of this continent from the dusky peoples cursed to have gotten here first. We can do it again. Although I will admit the vaccines-cause-autism movement puts some of our fighting strength at risk. It would be a shame if we lost this struggle due to a case of untreatable irony.

---

*smallpox pandemic
**suspension of all moral compunctions against killing
***overwhelming technological superiority in firepower