McDonnell is a macro economist at the American Enterprise Institute, an ostensibly nonpartisan public policy research think-tank here in Washington DC. Well, as Teddy Roosevelt used to say, horsefeathers! AEI is a community of sycophantic, neoconservative scholars and their obscenely wealthy supporters committed to making sure that the rich get richer and the poor get children. Well, all right, I admit it, that’s downright genocidal nasty of them, but they do pay their bills on time, okay? And keeping up my highly respectable domicile in Great Falls, Virginia involves me paying quite a few bills of my own, so I try not to be too judgmental – after all, who says the poor don’t deserve more children?
He’s a regular client, and this morning at his regular time, I was expecting to discuss the implications of the impending Greek default (and that’s putting it diplomatically, for sure – in Greek it’s “skata sta moutra sou ECB.”) Not that I’m very concerned, since I live and work in Washington DC, the place where the most powerful nation that has ever existed in the history of humanity prints its money. Nice place to live. If, or perhaps I should say, when, Greece defaults, well, then, the rest of the world in general, and Europe in particular – not so much, thanks to the Greeks and the other PIGS. Any maybe if they all catch pneumonia, the USA will come down with a pretty bad cold, too, just like it did in 2008 – everywhere but Washington DC. Nice place to live, no doubt about it.
I was in for a surprise, however, as McDonnell quickly revealed as soon as he made himself comfortable on the couch in my office in front of the picture window overlooking the White House.
“Screw the Greeks,” he sighed, as he took the top off his Juan Valdez latte, unwrapped a lemon poppy seed muffin and washed down a bite with obvious pleasure. “And screw the European Central Bank, too. I’ve got a problem, Tom. A personal problem,” he continued, taking another sip of coffee, “and that’s what we need to talk about.”
“I’m willing the help,” I vouched, “to the greatest extent possible of course, what is it?” Seriously, folks, although I usually do international and federal policy analysis, money is money, and if my clients want me to substitute for a psychiatrist, their mother, or the Archbishop of Canterbury instead, no problem – I send the invoice and either they or their employer sends me the cash; and, as my masseuse likes to say, “it’s your massage,” and likewise, I say, “it’s your consultation.” Just don’t ask me to give legal or medical advice, that’s all I ask, because I’m not a lawyer or a medical doctor, and I could get sued for shooting my mouth off about that stuff. Otherwise, hell, my opinion about anything under the sun is as good as anyone else’s, right? And if they value it sufficiently to pay the princely sums I demand for it, that’s their decision, isn’t it? Yes, it certainly is, and God bless America.
“It’s that Dolezal woman,” McDonnell fretted.
“Rachel Dolezal,” I responded, “the woman who, until last week, was the president of the Spokane National Association for the Advancement of Colored People?”
“Ugh,” McDonnell winced, “I hate it when people say what the ‘NAACP’ acronym means. That part about ‘Colored People’ sets my teeth on edge.”
“Oh, sorry,” I apologized. “You’re upset because she was caught impersonating a Negro, I suppose?”
“Negro!” he exclaimed, spitting out pieces of lemon poppy seed muffin and drops of Juan Valdez latte, slamming his paper coffee cup down for emphasis of his umbrage. “What do you mean, ‘Negro?’ She was caught impersonating a Black person!”
“Oh gee whiz,” I shrugged, “being but an Italian boy from Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy, what do I know? Negro, Black, African-American, Colored, Colored People, People of Color… forgive me, please, what should we call them, sir?”
“You should call them Black!” McDonnell thundered.
“No problem,” I affirmed. “’Black’ it is. Rachel Dolezal was caught impersonating a black woman. Pardon me, but – so what?”
“So,” he grumbled, “it bothers me.”
“It does?” I wondered aloud. “Why on earth should it?”
“Well,” he murmured, “it indicates that there’s something wrong with her, doesn’t it?”
“Wrong?” I shot back. “I don’t know – needy, silly and stupid maybe. Nothing remarkable, certainly. If all the needy, silly and stupid women in our society got as much attention as Rachel Dolezal, there wouldn’t be room on CNN and Fox for important things like Donald Trump running for President.”
“No, no,” he protested, “this is different. She was impersonating a Black person!”
“Not for the first time, by any means,” I pointed out. “Several white novelists and journalists, of both genders, have masqueraded as… um… Black people… in order to perform valuable research for their exposés of racism, bigotry and oppression in American society. And, of course, in the beginning, there was this…”
At that point, having been rather busy accessing resources on the Internet at my exquisitely high performance desktop workstation during our previous conversation, I was prepared to present and quickly display a digitally remastered clip of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer performing Mammy on the oversized UHDTV screen mounted above the two heavy oak doors leading from the reception area into my office. “Now that, I submit for you consideration, is the quintessential apotheosis of someone impersonating a Black person. What do you suppose…”
But my words went unheeded as McDonnell rushed across the room to be sick in a waste basket. “Jesus Christ Almighty!” he groaned as he made his way back to the couch, wiping his lips with a Juan Valdez Coffee Shop napkin. “What the [expletive] was that?”
“It was Al Jolson,” I explained, “singing a hit song in the very first major Hollywood motion picture with a sound track. It won an Academy Award.”
“I don’t care,” he gagged as he vertiginously resumed his seat on the couch, “if it won the Congressional Medal of Honor. It’s an offensive disgrace!”
“Then, I suppose,” I continued, “you are unaware that Amos and Andy was the most popular radio show in America for over ten years?”
“I didn’t know that,” he admitted, “but given what a racist society America has, it’s hardly surprising. What are you getting at?”
“Every single character in the Amos and Andy radio show was voiced by a white person,” I informed him. “They were all impersonating Black people.”
McDonnell convulsed once more, but managed to suppress any further need to vomit in my trash cans. “This is hardly the kind of help I was seeking,” he complained.
“I’m just trying to put your concerns in perspective,” I explained.
“So what’s your point?” McDonnell demanded, growing a bit green about the gills, having apparently lost interest in the remainder of his lemon poppy muffin, but nevertheless attempting to finish his coffee.
“That, not to put too fine a point on it,” I told him, “one monkey don’t stop the show. Here’s this… let’s say… misguided female… whose parents are… ah… well meaning white liberal do-gooders, apparently…”
“They’re fundamentalist Christian wackos,” he interrupted. “They believe the universe is six thousand years old. They speak in tongues. They home school their children with creationism and Bible verses and refuse medical treatment in favor of prayer.”
“I stand corrected,” I told him. “She is someone whose parents are even more toxic than well meaning white liberal do-gooders, which is no mean accomplishment, to be sure. How tragic. And, it seems, after they have raised her to early puberty, they go about adopting a gaggle of adorable little pickaninnies…”
“How dare you use that word!” McDonnell exploded. “That’s completely offensive!”
“Mister… McDonnell,” I replied, “as an employee of AEI, one of the most racist, conservative collections of troglodytes in our Nation’s Capital, I am completely mystified by your consternation.”
“Uh… I donno… I… I just… I suppose I’m just a bit… edgy… due to personal reasons,” he pleaded. “Forgive me for being such a hothead. I guess I must sound like Cornell William Brooks or somebody like that.”
“Understood,” I consoled. “Any insights on why her parents did that?”
“To demonstrate their commitment to the pro-life cause,” McDonnell related with an obvious wince.
“Given those circumstances,” I observed, “the fact that Ms. Dolezal didn’t do something much more extreme – such as becoming a mass murderer or a porn star, for instance – is in itself highly remarkable positive evidence of her resilience, integrity and basic strength of character. It would seem that Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal are perfect examples of why some people just simply shouldn’t have children, much less be allowed to adopt them. And you must admit, if she fixated on Blackness, if she in fact fetishized it, obsessed about it and convinced herself that underneath her lily-white Northern European Caucasian skin, she was actually Black, she certainly carried it off masterfully. And she did so with a great deal if style and panache, adroitly exploiting and leveraging the corrupt racist concepts of white America, portraying…”
“What corrupt racist concepts,” McDonnell challenged, “are those?”
“Well,” I explained, “in the corrupt racist concepts of America, you have your full-blooded Blacks, who are strict descendants of sub-Saharan Africans, forcibly imported or otherwise. Then you have your mulattoes, who are half white, of which our esteemed President Obama is a perfect example. Then there are the quadroons, who are one quarter Black, the octoroons, who are one eighth Black, and the hexadecaroons, who are one sixteenth Black. The practiced corrupt white racist eye, particularly in the American South, can readily distinguish each such category based on their skin tone and bone structure. And so also in the North, in urban centers such as New York City, where, for example, the skin tone of a quadroon was known to be exactly congruent to a standard brown paper bag; and that was the reason a brown paper bag was nailed to the wall by the entrance to the Harlem Cotton Club chorus girls’ dressing room – if they were darker than that brown paper bag, then they could not go on stage at the Harlem Cotton Club. The fact remains, it must be noted though, that such nomenclature, however useful to the maintenance of racial oppression in the United States, nevertheless begs the question of what happens when those folks – the mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons and hexadecaroons get together and make babies. As it happens, the results are entirely unpredictable, and what you get then are your macaroons, and there is simply no way to tell what those babies are going to look like when they grow up. And that’s the aspect of corrupt white American racism that Ms. Dolezal so adeptly exploited, because she realized that she could easily be mistaken for a macaroon – especially in a naive and unsophisticated place like Spokane.”
“All right,” McDonnell slowly choked out, “you got me, Collins. You hit the nail right on the head. That’s my problem. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
“You’re embarrassed,” I sought to elucidate, “because you and Rachel Dolezal are both from Spokane?”
“No, no, no!” McDonnell wailed as tears welled up in his eyes. “For Christ’s sake, Tom, can’t you see? I’m… a… macaroon!”
“What fraction?” I inquired.
“Eleven thirty-secondths,” he whimpered. “Same as my big brother Tyrone, who looks just like Miles Davis. And I look like… this. Go figure.”
“So,” I concluded, “you’re… passing for white.”
“Yeah,” he sobbed, “been doing it for nearly forty years.”
“And that explains why you were so… sensitive about how I spoke concerning… um… people of color,” I surmised.
“Yeah, yeah,” he sighed with a dismissive wave of his right hand, while dabbing tears from his cheeks with a Dior handkerchief held in his left, “I know – you were just talking about… us [expletive] the way you would with another white person. Believe me, it ain’t nothing I’m not used to, and I don’t blame you any more than I would any other ofay, narrow-backed, honky mayonnaise cracker who was talking to another ofay, narrow-backed, honky, mayonnaise cracker about Black people, okay?”
“And your wife,” I probed, “she hasn’t noticed anything… um… unusual… about… your children?”
“I… never married,” he confessed. “For that exact reason.”
“Well,” I opined, “if you could advance your career while remaining an unmarried man for your entire tenure at AEI and the other distinguished conservative institutions which have employed you, where ‘family values’ are held in paramount regard, I can’t imagine why you would be worried about some ah… ofay, narrow-backed, honky mayonnaise cracker figuring out that you aren’t actually, in fact, a white person.”
“I’m not worried about that!” he declared, suddenly indignant. “I’ve been passing a white for most of my life at this point! I’ve got it down to a fine art, in fact! No, Tom, it’s not that at all! What I’m worried about is what they’re doing to Rachel Dolezal! Look at all that hate and anger directed at her – just because she pretended to be Black. And what’s the advantage in pretending you’re Black? In racist America, there’s none whatsoever! She was literally asking to be persecuted, to be discriminated against – to be a second-class citizen! Damn it, I know what her life as a Black person was like, because I lived the life of a Black person in America, and it’s pure hell! That’s why I decided to pass as white, God damn it! Now suppose, Tom, just suppose, that after all this brouhaha about her, my parents decide to betray me like her parents did! That’s what I’m worried about! I don’t know how many white people are crazy enough pretend that they’re Black, but you don’t have to be a genius to figure out that once it becomes a vogue trend on Twitter to vilify people who impersonate Blacks, there’s going to be a backlash! Mark my words, the pendulum is bound to swing the other way – it always does! Don’t you see what I mean? It’s only a matter of time before people start looking for the Blacks who have been masquerading as white folks and calling them all the things the white liberals have been calling Rachel Dolezal! Accusing them of all the same vile motives! Holding them up to the same mocking ridicule! Snarking and sniping and slicing away at them on the Internet – meting out the death of a thousand cuts! It’s going to be a [expletive] witch hunt, and the mere thought of it is driving me completely insane!”
At that point, I engaged in a moment of serious reflection and concluded there wasn’t much else I could do – with a few mouse clicks and taps on my workstation keyboard, I displayed a very revealing, high definition picture of Cass Elliot on the UHDTV screen. “See that?” I asked.
“Uh… oh, yeah, I see it,” McDonnell declared.
Next, I flashed a picture of Kirstie Alley in a bright yellow string bikini bathing suit. “And how about her?” I inquired.
“Day-um!” he proclaimed. “Dat dere be mighty fine!”
“Okay,” I assured him, “you got nothin’ to worry about, brutha.”
“What you mean by dat?” he responded.
“Yo Johnson be doin’ de talkin’ when you sees dem fat sexy white wimmens?” I demanded in my best Ebonic dialect. “Yo want a tip drill in dat dere badonkadonk?”
“Yassuh,” he enthusiastically answered, staring fixated at the image. “Dat be one fine piece o’ [expletive] right dere, yowsa, yowsa, yowsa!”
“Mr. McDonnell,” I informed him, “put your troubled mind at rest.”
Removing the Dior handkerchief from his jacket breast pocket, and once more mopping his profusely sweating brow with it it, he returned my remark with an expression of intense relief mixed with extreme curiosity. “What… what do you mean?”
“I have just displayed two paragon signature archetypes from the Manhattan Multiphasic Negritude Index Personality Inventory Test, and you responded to them with flying colors.”
“And what does that mean?” McDonnell wondered.
“It provides,” I assured him, “incontrovertible, statistically valid scientific sociological proof that, despite the sixty-five point six-three percent white DNA in your cells, you are Black.”
“Yeah,” he whispered, “I knew that. So what?”
“So,” I admonished, “beat them to the punch! Go out there and get yourself a big, fat white woman, knock her up and pop out a bouncing baby macaroon as soon a possible! And when the right-wing reverse-discrimination lunatics come after you for passing as a white man, lead with your chin – hold up that baby and say ‘Lawsy, lawsy, what be dis den?’ And watch their jaws drop all the way to the floor!”
“You’re right!” McDonnell shouted triumphantly as he rose from the couch and strode over to my desk, giving me a smart slap on the back. “For some kinda guinea wop greaser Italian, Tom Collins Martini, you’re some kinda genuine American, too!”
“Aren’t we all?” I said. “Aren’t we all?