Here in the States, whiteness has been in the news.

Not so much in the news, actually, as in the commentary. In the New York Times opinion pages, a black writer named Nell Irvin Painter, a retired academic historian, opened up whole new territories of anti-white prejudice with a column about two Indian teenage boys—Indians from India—harassing four black teenage girls at a high-school football game in New Jersey. These Indian lads were, said Ms. Painter, quote, "enacting American whiteness."

How were they doing that, with their dark brown skin and all? Well, you see, they had learned the essentials of whiteness from being in America, where whiteness is a sort of toxic gas or miasma that poisons everyone who breathes it in—except, of course, black people.

Something like that, anyway. I'm always willing to concentrate on understanding a mathematical theorem, or a coherent chain of logic leading from reasonable premises to some interesting conclusion, or some new finding out of the rigorous sciences; but engaging with the kind of blackety-blackety-black flapdoodle extruded by the likes of Ms Painter seems like a mis-use of my god-given mental faculties.

Instead, my mind wandered to an old Jewish joke.

Two Jews are in a Vienna café in the 1930s. One of them is reading a Yiddish newspaper; the other one's reading a Nazi paper. The first Jew asks the second: "Why are you reading Nazi propaganda?" Replies the other: "I used to read the Yiddish newspaper, and all it talked about was how Jews are suffering helpless under pogroms and discrimination. In the Nazi newspaper I read about how we control the world. I prefer the good news!"

In the same spirit, maybe I should give Ms Painter's productions another try. It might cheer me up to read about how whiteness is such a tremendous force, it even warps the personalities of Indian kids. Hey, we whites make everything happen! Other races have no agency at all. We are masters of the universe!