Looking at your next-to-last sentence . . .

Looking at your next-to-last sentence, I'm inclined to ask: Are you asking us to accord you black-points, as well as girl-points? Are we expected to treat you as an oppressed black person, deserving of all support and help? What comes next, a minstrel-show in which black people dress in rags and chains, and bemoan DE OBERSEER whipping them for not picking enough cotton, and you, white as a stick of butter, are dressed in your finest oppression-rags, and bemoaning your oppressions alongside them, in an effort to collect reparation cash & prizes? At what point does the identity gamesmanship become . . . ridiculous? Look, the White Male Christian American identity is a heavy burden to bear. I get that. You have to be GOOD all the time, and TAKE CARE OF PEOPLE LESS FORTUNATE all the time, and you never get to do anything fun. I resort to Performance Art, so as to have a platform to GET INTO playing Hwite Male roles when it's convenient for me, and GET OUT of playing them when it isn't. (The game, when run to other peoples' advantage, typically goes like this: "You're a powerful white male, you have money and privilege! You're a powerless white boy so I can take your money and privilege!" Me: deploys papier-mache "powerful white male image" to make them spend time and energy striking at it, and keeps powerless white boy image well hidden where they can't get at it. To say nothing of making sure what ever cultural/property/financial resources I inherit from my dad are also WELL SQUIRRELED AWAY.) My nephew, as white & male as I am, got accepted at a prestigious east coast grad school to study art. We were all thrilled. Then I looked at his department's web-site, and saw that they LISTED the incoming class of 201X, all members, (and he was included there) but in the PICTURE at the top of the page, they only SHOWED the female/minority students. It's very hard for me to see that as not a deliberate anti-white-boy swipe, since, after all, studying visual representation strategies for articulating power is PRETTY MUCH WHAT YOU DO, in art school. I said to myself, he won't last a year. He didn't. He would do lefty things, like sitting for an afternoon watching peoples' responses to the temple of Dendur at the Met, and commenting on how aware (or not aware) they were that this was something that had been brutally stolen from Egypt and transported to NYC and reconstructed. (It was a gift from Egypt in the 1960's, but you can't let facts interrupt your Look-at-me-I'm-so-aware-of-colonialization narrative.) Even so, even with him sanctimoniously playing along with the game, they still canned him. And he was trying so hard. My father and I took him out for BBQ before he left for NYC, and he would actually say things like "I don't think this is a good conversation for an employee of (his undergrad school) to be having!" when we tried to point out what he was getting himself in for. He really thought all his progressive power-words would protect him! After all, my brother moved to a small town in a Mid-West state that's less than 1% white, so that's where he was brought up, and he was going from there to NEW YORK CITY . . . ! Part of being a cute, silly little White Boy is, occasionally, acting like a cute, silly, little girl. You have permission to do that here, just don't take the game too far; don't do anything stupid. Don't ruin the game of gender by arresting the play with an estrogen-drive gender-strait-jacket. In the 18th C, you would have done well in a "molly house," all dressed in a frilly outfit, playing the lady's maid, participating in mock-marriage ceremonies, screaming about have a fake pregnancy, having mad sex with the other sillies of the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_house Be aware, my little white lamb, that they will kill you and eat you for all your intersectional pretensions. Study the intersectional talk, practice the intersectional talk, all you want. You are still a lamb in wolf's clothing; they all know it; they will kill you and eat you just the same. ---Sb