Are Caucasians Back in Vogue?

Are Caucasians back in vogue?

KVOA News in Tucson apparently thinks so.  It recently ran a news story about a report from the Pima County Health Department on the number of overdose deaths in the county in 2023.  The story said that 532 county residents died that year from an overdose.  It went on to say, “The majority of these deaths involved people who were Caucasian or between the ages of 30 and 39.”

I haven’t heard the word “Caucasian” used in a news story in decades.  It had been replaced long ago by the word “white” to denote race.  However, in a case of grammatical inconsistency, “white” isn’t capitalized in current style guides, but “Black” is capitalized when used to denote race.

This is but one example of America’s Racial Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, or ROCD for short.

ROCD is a widespread mental condition in which people experience persistent, intrusive, illogical, contradictory thoughts about race (and ethnicity) that cause stress and discord. Individuals and society try to counteract the dissonance by performing repetitive mental gymnastics and intellectual somersaults, which don’t address the root problem and thus perpetuate the cycle of pathology.

ROCD can be seen in the need to force-fit people into artificial racial boxes and to assign racial labels to them, like bar codes on cans of vegetables at the supermarket.  But because the boxes and labels were contrived to begin with, they undergo frequent revision and manipulation, especially by government.

Brain damage can be caused by ROCD, as seen in the article at this link.  The article tries to explain the difference between “Caucasian” and “white,” and why “white” is the correct racial term.  Warning:  The convoluted logic will make your head spin like Linda Blair’s head in “The Exorcist.”

Currently, there are seven official racial boxes:  white, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, and Middle Eastern, which is the newest addition.  (Sometimes, “Latino” is substituted for “Hispanic,” although the two are not synonymous, anthropologically speaking.)

These magnificent seven have replaced the antiquated labels of Southern European, Slavic, Negro, Indian, Occidental, Oriental, Mongoloid, Caucasian, and white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP).

As with the labels that they replaced, the magnificent seven are a mishmash of skin color (white, Black), ethnicity and geography (Hispanic), indigeneity (Native American), and geography (Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern).  Each box is not homogeneous or discrete, and there is considerable overlap and blurring between the boxes.

In spite of this ambiguity, the all-knowing US government and its minions in every subsidiary public and private institution believe that they have the wisdom and objectivity to sort the hundreds of unique ethnic groups and nationalities around the world into these seven boxes.  And like Solomon, they know where to place someone who has parents from two different boxes.

Universities are particularly adept at this sorting.  For example, they know with great certainty in which box to place an applicant from Brazil of Japanese descent who speaks Portuguese.  The same for an applicant from Argentina of Italian descent and olive complexion who speaks Spanish.

They also know the precise boundaries of the various geographic regions, including the Middle East, parts of which used to be called the Orient, and parts of which lie in Asia Minor.  With this expertise, universities know in which box to place someone who hails from Istanbul and has the same skin shade as Turkish President Recep Erdogan, who leads what is left of the former Ottoman Empire, which engaged in settler colonialism for centuries.  Likewise, they know where to place someone who hails from Mongolia and resembles the early settler colonialist, Genghis Kahn.  And they know the right box for someone from Libya who resembles former dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who extended his country’s settler colonialism to the Sahel of Africa.

At the same time, universities say that race is a social construct that has little or no basis in genetics, but then they contradict themselves and proceed as if race is scientifically determined and not subjective.  Apparently, race is to universities what pornography is the Supreme Court:  It can’t be defined, but you know it when you see it.

This doublespeak is further muddled by political, economic and social agendas.  You know the underlying stereotypes and generalizations:  that whites are privileged, racist, fragile, in denial, and guilty en masse of settler colonialism; that Blacks remain disadvantaged due to slavery, Jim Crow and the ongoing racism of whites, not to any pernicious effects of welfare; that other people of color and other minorities are disadvantaged because whites have kept them down; and that whites are oppressors and everyone else is oppressed.

It takes a special kind of ignorance and a cherry-picking of history to tar all whites with this ugly brush while ignoring the injustices and even barbarity committed by other races and nationalities, as if human nature isn’t universal.  Particularly selective is the exempting of Hispanics from the tarring, as if the Spanish Empire was a paragon of justice and didn’t enslave more Africans than the English and Dutch, didn’t slaughter indigenous people, and didn’t leave a legacy in Mexico and other Latin American countries of corruption, a one-party state, a two-class society of aristocrats and peasants, an economy built on extraction instead of innovation and production, and a Church that resisted land reforms, especially in Mexico.

Admittedly, I’m resentful because I’m a man without a box.  Why don’t I have a box?  First, Italians don’t fit cleanly in any of the seven boxes, because they have some of the most diverse DNA on the planet.  Second, they don’t feel welcome in the white box, because the WASP establishment determined at the end of the nineteenth century that Italians weren’t white.

Maybe Caucasians will adopt me.

Mr. Cantoni can be reached at craigcantoni@gmail.com.