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Saturday, March 31, 2012

On wanting to become black

Gerard VanderLeun wants to blend in just so the New Black Panthers won't put a bounty on his head and Spike Lee won't tweet his home address.

But how best to do that? At first I tried skin-tinting, or as my dermatologist likes to say, "reverse Jacksoning." Alas I quickly discovered, as millions of my fellow Americans of the African persuasion have discovered, that it just isn't that easy to change my hue. The other night I steeped in a bathtub I'd filled with hot water and 496 Black Teabags. I was hoping for some sort of mahogany tint by midnight but all I got was a transdermal caffine rush.




Yesterday morning I briefly applied a gallon of walnut body paint but one glance in the mirror and I recalled that running around in blackface, or even walnutface, was frowned on from every official African American from Lewis Farrakhan to Rachael Maddow and that albino president Bill Clinton. Hence body paint was right out. Following that I considered a full body tattoo using India Ink but the process of covering half of one cuticle was so painful I backed out of that one too.
So maybe the next best thing is wearing a hoodie but:
Of course, dressing in a hoodie in support of my African-American non-hood hoodie wearing fellow citizens was hard for me since I was, I am deeply ashamed to say, born white. Not just white but worse, WASP. As such I can't just boogie down with my bad self to the half-block ghetto of Seattle and grab me a genuine hoodie. As a WASP I not only don't know where the Hood Hoodie Store is, I am not allowed to know.

No fear, the NRA to the rescue: NRA Concealed Carry Hooded Sweatshirt!

If you can't be black, I guess the next best thing is to be a woman with a Flashbang holster
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