There’s been a lot of talk these last couple of weeks about “hipster racism” or “ironic racism”—or, as I like to call it, racism. It’s, you know, introducing your black friend as “my black friend”—as a joke!!!—to show everybody how totally not preoccupied you are with your black friend’s blackness. It’s the gentler, more clueless, and more insidious cousin of a hick in a hood; the domain of educated, middle-class white people (like me—to be clear, I am one of those) who believe that not wanting to be racist makes it okay for them to be totally racist. “But I went to college — I can’t be racist!” Turns out, you can.

People benefit from racism—hell, I benefit from it every day—and things that benefit powerful people don’t just suddenly get “fixed” and disappear because Halle Berry won an Oscar or whatever. Modern racism lives in entrenched de facto inequalities, in coded language about “work ethic” and “states’ rights,” in silent negative spaces like absence and invisibility, and in Newt Gingrich’s hair. And in irony.

Good news, ladies! Society has discovered another new thing that’s wrong with you, which means another opportunity for you to make yourself more attractive for your man. Score! Turns out, the color of your vagina is gross and everyone hates it. So bleach that motherfucker. Bleach it right now!

So what are the pro-vadge-bleaching people thinking? Here’s a hilarious explanation from a male ad exec:

“It is hard to deny that fairness creams often get social commentators and activists all worked up. What they should do is take a deep breath and think again. Lipstick is used to make your lips redder, fairness cream is used to make you fairer-so what’s the problem? I don’t think any Youngistani today thinks the British Raj/White man is superior to us Brown folk. That’s all 1947 thinking!

The only reason I can offer for why people like fairness, is this: if you have two beautiful girls, one of them fair and the other dark, you see the fair girl’s features more clearly. This is because her complexion reflects more light. I found this amazing difference when I directed Kabir Bedi, who is very fair and had to wear dark makeup for Othello, the Black hero of the play. I found I had to have a special spotlight following Kabir around the stage because otherwise the audience could not see his expressions.”

Before 1980, Census enumerators categorized people into racial groups based on their appearance.  They did not ask respondents how they characterized themselves.  Instead, they made a judgment call, drawing on explicit instructions given to the Census takers.

On a mail-in survey, however, the individual self-identified.  They got to tell the government what race they were instead of letting the government decide.  There were at least two striking shifts as a result of this change:

• First, it resulted in a dramatic increase in the Native American population.  Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. Native American population magically grew 110%.  People who had identified as American Indian had apparently been somewhat invisible to the government.
• Second, to the chagrin of the Census Bureau, 80% of Puerto Ricans choose white (only 40% of them had been identified as white in the previous Census).  The government wanted to categorize Puerto Ricans as predominantly black, but the Puerto Rican population saw things differently.

I wonder if the switch to Mailing census effected race in a different way such as poor or working class people who may move often or don’t have a permanent address, or address at all….

“Dedmon was indicted for capital murder, which in Mississippi carries a sentence of death or life in prison without parole, but District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith said prosecutors couldn’t have gotten a conviction. For capital murder, there must be an underlying offense, which had been robbery. Smith said that the investigation revealed that the group did not take Anderson’s wallet, as investigators first believed.”

there was no underlying offense because as they testified- they were going out to mess with black people.

“sources who wished to remain anonymous said the teens “had, as a practice, targeted African Americans in the city of Jackson who were homeless.” He’s now working to verify the legitimacy of those claims.” (http://abcnews.go.com/US/white-teens-run-black-man-surveillance-video/story?id=14273579#.T3W_V9mwWTk)

In November of last year, police responded to the sounding of a medical alert device belonging to 68-year-old Kenneth Chamberlain, who is black, at his home on Lexington Avenue….

Police claim they arrived to the scene of an emotionally disturbed Chamberlain, who authorities claim was screaming and at one point, displayed a knife through a door crack.

Police tried to use a Taser and bean-bag gun to subdue Chamberlain before eventually shooting him twice….

The incident was captured on both video and audio recording — including video from outside the apartment, audio from his medical alert pendant and audio and video from the Taser used by police.

After campaigning via Twitter and Facebook for several weeks, our web series, “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl” beat out 783 other web series to win the 2012 Shorty Award for Best Web Show. For the unfamiliar, the Shorty Awards honor the best in social media and Internet content, so it was quite the honor that: 1) our viewers rallied to nominate us into the top five shows and 2) the Shorty Award committee recognized our impact on the web series community.

So it was with great pride that I announced our accomplishments via Facebook and Twitter, much to the mutual excitement of our awesome supporters. And that’s when the Internet-equivalent of the Tea Party appeared:

All I got to say is