With respective tips of the hat to Ace of Spades, Twitchy, and Snark and Boobs, I give you the perfect illustration of why I blog under a pseudonym: the racist peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
To you and me, and any other sane person, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is "food."
To a group of genuinely horrible sounding people in Portland, some of whom are inexplicably permitted to wield authority over children, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is a "seemingly innocent example" of "the subtle language of racism."
I don't deny the persistence of racism in the U.S. Neither do I deny being, at least to some extent, its beneficiary, in so far as I am white.
But I question both the utility, and the fundamental sanity, of turning grade school into a parody of ethnic studies programs by interjecting race into peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Bonus question: If peanut butter is racist, then does that mean that George Washington Carver was racist?
What has that got to do with my use of a pseudonym, you ask?
Simple. I am a libertarian-leaning conservative in a blue city in a blue state, and I don't have any desire to risk reprisals from colleagues or employers.
Q: What sort of person would be unbalanced enough to seek reprisals against someone simply for being conservative?
A: The sort of person unbalanced enough to see racism in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Perhaps eventually I will cease caring, and out myself like Josh Passell. But at present my sense of the calculus is that there is relatively little upside, and material potential downside. So until that changes (or Universal Studios complains about copyright infringement), I shall remain Senator Blutarsky.
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