Against my better judgment

My curiosity finally got the better of me, and I clicked on the page that made a picture of a group of happy white people in blackface the number two Google image search result for happy white people.

Hoo boy.

It's a Medium article -- also duplicated, without the blackface pic and with a somewhat less confusing title, on HuffPost -- called "Dear White People, Boycotting Netflix Won’t Make You Any Whiter Than You Already Are," subtitled "But, you can try." (Why this article about white people trying to be even whiter is illustrated with a photo of white people trying to be black is anyone's guess. You know, editors!) The author, one Ezinne Ukoha, unfortunately failed to specify preferred pronouns, but I infer from the Twitter handle @nilegirl that Ezinne is a name given to girls along the reedy Nile and will refer to her accordingly.

At first I assumed the article would be about that Netflix kiddie-porn thing that's been in the news recently, which I believe was produced by a woman of color and is therefore totally racist to boycott -- but actually it was written way back in early 2017, when the thing to boycott was apparently a TV series about how white people are bad. (How quaint! Simpler times, people.)

I was afraid that reading the thing would be a waste of my time, but it turns out Ms. Ukoha -- who describes herself as a "Juggling Wordsmith" -- is the kind of writer that only comes around once in a generation. Behold what is almost certainly the single most awesome sentence ever to grace the English language:

First off, the times call for a bold ushering of unabashed throttling towards all the reasons why being Black in America has afforded such anguish at the behest of those who commissioned themselves superior enough to mandate our misery.

Richard Dawkins once wrote that when he finished reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, he immediately turned right back to page one and read it again. It was that good. That's how I feel about this sentence. As soon as I had reached the end, I immediately felt compelled to go back and read it again from the beginning. And again. And again. Like all great literature, it is inexhaustible, and repeated rereadings can only deepen one's appreciation.

I know it's offensive to call a black person "articulate," and I would never dream of giving offense here, so I'll just repeat the descriptor Ms. Ukoha herself has chosen: she is, without a doubt, the mother of all Juggling Wordsmiths, throwing her word-hammer, word-anvil, and word-tongs about with all the casual dexterity of a chef tossing a salad.

Later in the article, the Juggling Wordsmith calls out a CNN reporter for one of those hilarious gaffes white people are always committing.

On the same day Dear White People started to trend— CNN’s Chris Cuomo was taken to task for poorly defending his right to report the facts above the threatening clout of "fake news."

"I see being called 'fake news' as the equivalent of the N-word for journalists, the equivalent of calling an Italian any of the ugly words that people have for that ethnicity."

Facepalm! Listen, Chris Cuomo, let me explain something to you. The N-word is like the freaking Holocaust of insults. It has no equivalents. You don't compare anything to it. You--

Oh, wait.

Crap.

Anyway, back to the article. Here's another virtuoso sentence from the Juggling Wordsmith -- not quite as awe-inspiring as the first, but then sequels never are.

Your whiteness doesn’t scream through the streets as we battle the pain of our steps that are commanded by the streams of blood that leave footprints leading to the next victim who dies for the sake of being Black — while being White and right keeps the body count fatefully cohesive.

Dude, she gave White and Black equal capitalization! That's actually kind of cool. Oh, right, it was 2017.

Your whiteness has never protected the Black man who once occupied the Oval Office from the deluge of insults that overwhelmed his official capacity even when he was the very best human draped in the Technicolor of hope and victory.

Checkmate, privilege-deniers. As humans draped in the Technicolor of hope and victory go, Obama was undoubtedly the very best, but a deluge of insults can overwhelm the official capacity of even the best of us! And what a contrast with the white presidents who came before and after him -- George W. Bush and Donald Trump -- who, protected from deluges of insults by their white privilege, were always treated with the utmost respect.

I could go on. Every sentence is so perfect that I just want to quote them all -- but of course that would amount to imperialistically appropriating the labors of a person of color, so I'll stop here and just say read the whole thing.

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By the way, if you do a web search rather than an image search for happy white people, the first result is an article called "'If Your Hair Is Relaxed, White People Are Relaxed. If Your Hair Is Nappy, They’re Not Happy': Black Hair as a Site of 'Post-Racial' Social Control in English Schools" -- but this time I'll resist the temptation.