And as can be expected anytime anyone of note spins off this mortal coil, social media has been flooded with tweets, status updates and blog posts (ahem) about the man and his legacy. Of course, these tributes have been tarnished by the same blemish that brought Paterno down from his perch as college football’s winningest coach: mentions of his major moral misstep when confronted with information that his then defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky sexually abused children.

What’s most striking — though sadly not shocking — is how much of this lazy lionizing is so tightly wrapped in admiration that it calls for temporary amnesia or outright dismissal of Paterno’s most significant failure.

All this pledging allegiance to the man reminded me of a classic Jerry Seinfeld bit about the rabidity of sports fans.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of sports. I can’t list any stats (unless they involve how marriageable Tim Tebow isn’t) and I’m not terribly invested in who wins the Super Bowl. However, until recently, the thing that I’ve always loved about sports is how it often prizes the collective over the individual.

This blog has always been about the outsider feeling that has colored, for lack of a better term, so much of my life. I was the girl who scrawled the lyrics to Mariah Carey‘s “Outside” on the front of my middle-school math text. Fitting in was never for me. But growing up with an athletic and hypermasculine basketball coach for a father taught me something very important: “Never trust a man who doesn’t like sports.”

The flag we pledge alliance to each Saturday in fall. Some seasons it seems to work better than others.

Apparently you don’t have to be an awkward black girl in a predominately white environment to seek belongingness. All you have to be is human, which is why I completely empathize with sports fans. I still wear my Iowa Hakweyes sweatpants with pride and smile each fall Saturday morning when my dad hangs the Hawkeye flag outside our home. Feeling part of something larger than yourself is comforting. And when that collective triumphs, it’s inspiring. It’s uplifting. It’s a feeling no individual victory can trump.

And that’s all great. But I don’t bleed black and gold. I could never fully give myself over to the gridiron religion for the same reason it’s Sunday and I’m sitting in a bath robe instead of a choir robe or a jersey, on my bed instead of in a church pew or a stadium seat. I just can’t fully give myself to an entity bigger than myself. Maybe it’s because I’m a control freak, maybe it’s because I’m a token or maybe it’s simply that I’m staring at these people who are logically able and willing to pretend that it’s totally acceptable and forgivable to not do everything in one’s power to stop child abuse.

It’s the same hesitant and sick feeling I got when I watched Alex Gibney‘s great documentary “Catching Hell.”

I cringed throughout the film, remembering the chants and slurs directed at the ultimate Chicago Cubs fan, vilified and victimized by his own for the unending passion for the game and his team that they all shared. How can the same mindset, the same breed of tribalism, that turned against  Steve Bartman for “thwarting*” the team’s World Series hopes, envelop a man who failed to protect children? When did sports fandom turn into the Mafia?

Paterno was a good man who missed the ball when it mattered most. But unlike Bartman, Paterno’s massive moral fumble may have resulted in abuse and permanent psychological damage for scores of young men. Whether or not it’s the case, I don’t agree that the debate about JoePa’s character should die along with him. Certainly not as long as the victims of his inaction are still alive to suffer.

I don’t agree with everything Bill Maher says, and find some of it downright offensive, but he was right when he once said Communism and Stalinism were state-sponsored religions. Well, he can add another one to that list: sports. (There’s no separation of church and state if the government is paying for the church/stadium. And don’t forget that football coaches at state universities are indeed public employees.) Jon Stewart wasn’t so far off, either, when he compared Penn State to the Catholic Church.

Remember whichever version of JoePa you want. Maybe it’s the quiet, quirky old guy stumbling around the sidelines as he led his team to victory. Maybe it’s the college football mastermind. Or perhaps it’s a guy who was great on the field and less so off of it. But in my mind it can’t be all three. You can’t be a God and yet just “like so many of us” with our human failings.

I was wrong. The religion of Penn State football, with its Church of Saint JoePa, didn’t crumble when he was fired last November. No, it’s all disintegrating now. The savior has died — with resurrection looking unlikely — and the disciples, in excusing his inaction, are now admitting he was indeed a mere mortal. Come next Sunday, that’s going to make worship a lot more uncomfortable.

*Never forget that there was a ninth inning and a seventh game for the 2003 Cubs to screw up, which they did, post-Bartman.

High school, as I’ve mentioned before, wasn’t exactly a bastion of acceptance. It was more a place of well-meaning but lazy colorblindness.

That memory came to my mind when I read a blog post on Education Week‘s Curriculum Matters blog last week, detailing the parents’ outrage after Beaver Ridge Elementary School in Norcross, Ga. assigned students math problems about slavery. The parents’ ire was raised after students brought home questions including, “If Frederick [presumably a reference to escaped slave turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass, whom Beaver Ridge Principal Jose DeJesus says third-graders were studying] got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”

Another gem was “Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?”

Well then. It almost makes me long for the days of Chris Rock‘s black history education.

The city of Norcross is 19.8 percent black, considerably more diverse than the largely white suburban utopia (with a black population of only 1.91 percent) where I received my diploma, and that’s what shocked me. See, nothing this egregious ever happened in my schooling despite the almost complete lack of ethnic diversity in my school. I guess I was lucky.

I mean, there were black kids at my school. I didn’t have class with them — a victim of the tracking system, I was often the only black student and almost always the only black female in my accelerated and Advanced Placement classes — but they existed. They congregated on what some of my white peers, no doubt with great respect and affection I’m sure, referred to as “the ghetto stairs” in the back of the school.

That’s what diversity looked like at my high school: a system of willful and institutionally assisted segregation.

I was never forced to do slavery word problems. I didn’t have to pose in pictures to play up the school’s inclusivity for marketing materials. I wasn’t referred to as a token.

No, I just had friends who thought the word “nigger” was funny. I just hung out with guys who doubled over in laughter at the thought of a black person playing or coaching hockey (clearly they’d never heard of Kevin Weekes).

My high school had a hip-hop dance team that was probably 75 percent black. One of my friends, after walking by the room where they practiced, remarked that it “smelled like sweaty black people.”

And all of that sucked. But at least my homework, the stuff I had to do in order to graduate, wasn’t filled with such outright bigotry.

Principal DeJesus and school district spokeswoman Sloan Roach both said that the slavery math was an attempt by teachers to “create cross-curricular lessons,” integrating — ironically enough — history and math.

What’s that they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions?

This is what institutionalized racism looks like. This is the token experience. People mean well but don’t consult people of color to see if those good intentions are paired with positive action.

When people brag to me about how post-racial this country is, this is the shit I want to throw in their faces.

Yeah, we have a black president. Good for us. We also have teachers, you know, the people who are supposed to safeguard against stuff like this, inflicting it. It’s a lot more than just Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and “Free to be You and Me.”

It’s having to tell to your white friends why you don’t wash your hair every day. It’s explaining the Sickle Cell Anemia trait to your high school biology class. It’s being the only black kid in a room full of your white peers as you watch the Clayton Bigsby blind white supremacist sketch from “Chappelle’s Show” in class and trying not to vomit as you pretend that their laughter doesn’t disgust you. [For the record, I loved “Chappelle’s Show” because I got the jokes. You know the people who drove Dave crazy? The white people "laughing for the wrong reasons"? Those people were my classmates.]

And you know what? There was a teacher sitting in that classroom as my “friends” howled at Clayton Bigsby and repeated his racist rants for laughs. I’m not mad at that teacher. I don’t blame her. She was blindsided and probably as paralyzed as I was. She was like most of my teachers when it came to race: When you have only one black student in your class, you as the instructor take your cues from that student.

But someone has to educate the educators. And it’s an unfair burden to place on a 17-year-old black student, in my case, or the third-graders in Norcross.

It’s unforgiveable that a hierarchy of assumedly licensed and qualified people, people whom I’m sure meant no harm, people whom I’m sure are committed to one of the most important roles society has to fill – that of molding the minds of America’s future – allowed these word problems to appear on a math assignment. It’s no longer about the act; it’s about the unchecked process that facilitated it.

The first three years of my elementary school experience included amazing teachers, both black and white, and a wonderfully diverse and accepting school — a school named after Dr. King — and prepared me for the challenges I faced when I moved to a place where race wasn’t acknowledged, save for reading “Number the Stars” and platitude-filled Februaries. There were very few lessons of practical application and instead just a lot of refrains about the past, because for a lot of my teachers that was the best they could knowledgeably offer.

It wasn’t all downhill from King Elementary School. I had quite a few great teachers once I moved, like the seventh-grade social studies teacher who – when I did my best Julia Sugarbaker imitation during a Civil Rights Movement lesson and asked if the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People should change its name since we don’t call black people “colored” anymore (though I went to high school with a girl who thought that was the official lingo) – he didn’t shy away. When I asked this unintentionally inflammatory question, he didn’t pretend that he couldn’t hear me. This white teacher stared me right in the eye, in front of all my classmates, and admitted that he didn’t have the answer. He told me that I should go home and ask my parents what they thought.

It wasn’t revolutionary. He didn’t end racism. But what that teacher did was brave. Not only did he not make me feel bad for asking a question, he didn’t quash my desire for knowledge, and he admitted in front of his students that he wasn’t omnipotent. And in 12 years I never forgot him or his action.

And just as that lesson always stayed with me, the third-graders of Beaver Ridge Elementary School with probably never forget that they learned 56 divided by 8 equals 7 oranges per slave and that two beatings a day equals 14 beatings a week for the future abolitionist.

That’s the thing about school. It never really leaves you even long after you’ve left it.

Of American women who have not yet read “The Help.” However, after months of resistance, I just finished watching the movie with my mother.

I didn’t want to see “The Help” because I’m not really one for lady movies, especially ones that appear to aspire to make white people feel better about racism. Yeah, I judged a film by online posts — and I’m not really ashamed of that even though I was wrong.

In "The Help," Octavia Spencer (left) and Viola Davis portray the stories of two women who could very easily be found only two generations away from my branch in the Fluker family tree. For me, it was two generations too close for comfort. (Photo from AllMoviePhoto.com)

What was harder to admit, because it was painfully true, was that part of me didn’t want to see “The Help” because I didn’t want to look into the eyes of Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer and see my grandmothers. Unlike the exclusively white group of women who have  encouraged me to see the movie and read the book, I don’t get to identify with Skeeter Phelan and Celia Foote — the most sympathetic of the film’s white characters. I’m forced to confront my family tree.

What ended up being most difficult about seeing “The Help” wasn’t the legacy of my nonagenarian grandmother — who read the book last summer, serving as a huge endorsement (who am I to be offended when she’s the one who lived through it?) — but in seeing these strong and bold black women who were forced to bend to the will of their white female employers. In them, I saw myself. And I had nothing to feel but shame.

Unlike the maids who populate “The Help,” I’m not serving white people in order to provide for my family. No, I’m putting the needs of my life’s many white women and men ahead of my own out of some sick brand of token guilt. I bristled at Bryce Dallas Howard‘s harsh tones toward Spencer’s Minny Jackson, all while thinking that if a woman now had yelled at me to cut her mother a slice of pie, I’d probably tell her to **SPOILER ALERT** “eat my shit” too.

Except that I wouldn’t.

No, I’ve taken all the black suffering and white privilege from “The Help” and flipped it, moving all that Sturm und Drang from those maids’ professional lives to my personal life. And worst of all, I’m not forced by cultural constraints and politics to put white people’s needs ahead of my own. I’m doing it out of my own compulsion, which makes me the oppressor and the oppressed.

[Before we go any further, let me say that not speaking up for myself and allowing my well-meaning, if selfish, friends and acquaintances to peer pressure me is a literal WORLD away from the oppression and near-torture the maids of the '60s endured. I'm drawing a parallel to connect to my experiences. I am not trying to overplay my self-inflicted martyrdom or at all undermine the sacrifices and struggles of the black women before me.]

It's like my story, only with fewer cute outfits and a whole lot more self-inflicted suffering. Oh, and a very small fraction of the racism. And none of the violence. In fact, my story is as sanitized a version of "The Help" as "The Help" is of history. (Image from Wikipedia)

I’m surrounded by well-meaning white people who are oh-so-eager for me to be happy, as long as my idea of happiness aligns perfectly with theirs. It’s the friends who are desperate  for me to get into a serious romantic relationship — presumably so I too can enjoy the affirmation that comes from the affections of emotionally stunted 25 year olds with raging commitment issues. It’s the pals who daydream about where my career will take me one day, as long as my rèsumè isn’t more illustrious than theirs and as long as those new professional opportunities don’t take me to warmer climes with bigger, bustling metropolises. After all, I can’t make their lives easier if I’m out trying to improve mine. Who else will solve your personal crises?

It’s also in those same emotionally stunted 25 year olds, the dashingly handsome men who only want to tell you they love you when they’re positive that no one else is saying it to you; the ones only willing to praise your brilliance when they’re confident that no one else has noticed it.

This token is The New Millennium Help. No, I’m not raising white children and my friends don’t force me to pee outside and clean their homes. However, as the girl who feels like she doesn’t have much to offer beyond her not totally awful personality and average intellect, I’ve somehow assumed the burden of cruise director.

The people I went to high school with described me as “jolly” and knew me for my laugh. And ever since I was reduced to a skin tone, an adjective and a weird affectation, I’ve saddled myself with living up to it all. If I’m not the one making sure everyone else is always having fun at any social gathering, what am I doing there? I can’t just be there to enjoy myself! And after a decade of that, people have gotten used to it. And I’ve let them. So if I have an off day, or just don’t feel like socially whoring myself out — telling jokes, dancing or doing everything in my power to strangle the spotlight — to make people happy, I’m derelict in all those token duties. I couldn’t just be good enough; I had to be serving a purpose.

Such is the self-induced burden [though society and my peers certainly didn't do anything to counteract it].

I’m not mad at these people, though. I get it: A happy slave is a more productive slave. But because slaves couldn’t really decide or pursue their own fulfillment — surely picking cotton, raising other people’s children and cleaning up after white folks would not have ranked high on their list of dreams — masters got to dictate and define happiness for their servants. The men and women of the houses did this all while getting to pretend that they were humane and even altruistic, much like the housewives of “The Help” who didn’t mind sharing bathrooms with their maids.

The Halloween where I took "The Help" craze a little too literally. (Image courtesy of my own vanity and shame.)

As I noted previously, and just so it won’t get twisted, there is a gulf between what Minny and Aibileen – and their real-life doppelgängers — went through and my millennial whining. I’m a slave in the weakest sense and the only person cracking the whip is me. Life as a token in 2012 isn’t easy, but it’s cushy compared to any other options I’d have.

In a strange and juvenile coincidence, I decided in the last hours of Dec. 31, 2011 to adopt “eat shit” as my motto for 2012. It’s the phrase that has given me confidence as I’ve struggled to learn, at 24, how to put my needs before others when necessary. I didn’t realize I was taking unconscious lessons from Kathryn Stockett‘s playbook.

In place of baking unsavory pies or writing a vengeful — and in my case, lightweight — roman à clef, I should’ve stood up for myself. I should’ve told everyone who wrongly assumed I was only a big butt and a smile, solely there for the shuckin’ and jivin’, just how wrong they were. I accept the situation I’m in now, one largely of my own creation.

However, I’m refusing to play out what in some ways is the most depressing part of “The Help.” Those women were the cornerstones, the foundations, of the white families for whom they worked. But these maids couldn’t find empowerment in that fact due to the very real societal, financial and political hurdles. But unlike them, I have a choice.

The next time someone whines a request for me to do something I don’t want to do solely to please them, I can simply say “no.” After all, it’s a dangerous prospect to hitch your happiness wagon to someone who isn’t forced to tow it and isn’t bound to its success.

The stories of Aibileen, Minny, Skeeter, Celia and company all ended with a page turn and a fade to black. For me and the people in my life, it won’t be so subtle. It’ll be the sound of their lives’ metaphorical Jenga blocks crashing to the ground, which will be the first chime of my freedom.

I’ll be sure to thank all my friends for the help.

I know that’s an insufferable trait. No one really wants to be around someone who constantly points out her own shortcomings, but seeing the massive moral black hole that is Penn State today, I’m reminded that it’s OK to ruthlessly hold yourself to an ever-escalating standard.

I’m disgusted by the Penn State students who tore through State College, Pa. last night, rioting to protect a coach and, by extension, a football program that clearly is suffering from moral gangrene. Why aren’t those students sitting vigil for the eight boys — possibly more though hopefully not — who lost their innocence and sense of security to former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky and his heinous acts? I don’t mean to speak ill of all Penn State students because I know they weren’t all rioting and I don’t know how each one of them feels about the situation, but I am calling out the actions of the irresponsible students who felt the need to tip vans over and break windows because their coach was fired on the phone after 61 years of service to the university and a moral oversight that irrevocably ruined young lives.

That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about Penn State. I’m a Big Ten disciple from way back, folks. I grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich. I was potty trained on a University of Iowa toilet seat. My father works for a Big Ten university, as did my uncle — it’s a long story — and I graduated from a Big Ten school, the same one both of my parents attended. I don’t need someone to tell me about the legend of JoePa. I don’t need to be told of the significance of 409 wins. None of that is what this is about.

It makes me ill when people throw statistics and platitudes about legacies and school spirit into the conversation about coach Joe Paterno’s unceremonious firing at the hands of Penn State trustees. JoePa doesn’t need your support. JoePa doesn’t need to be defended. Almost 24 years of watching Big Ten football has taught me one thing: The story of every game starts with the numbers — be they scores or records. Coach Paterno’s stats will forever live to tell the story of his impact on the Big Ten, college football and Penn State University. Unfortunately, his removal from the program he helped build will speak for Paterno’s moral character — and the only person who can save himself from that legacy didn’t act when he knew he should have.

People fail. People make mistakes. We’re all only as good as the last bad thing we did while knowing better. That’s the crucial part; the knowing better. I beat myself up all the time because I say awkward things, don’t save money and sometimes hurt people’s feelings when I know I shouldn’t. And I’m wrong.

There’s a world of difference between buying makeup that you can’t afford and helping sweep away the systematic sexual abuse of young children. When it comes to something that severe, if you aren’t part of the solution then you are by definition part of the problem. Sandusky’s victims were not closeted adults consensually experimenting with their desires and capable of drawing boundaries. These young men were children. And any decision Paterno, eyewitness and assistant coach Mike McQueary, athletic director Tim Curley, vice president Gary Schultz, president Graham Spanier – whose heads have all rolled, save for McQueary (whose ears must be burning) – or anyone else made to do anything but immediately stop Sandusky from raping and molesting these children was a conscious choice to allow the behavior to continue. In this instance, behavior and consequences are black and white.

Drew Magary over at Deadspin made an excellent point in a thoughtful post about how good people — which he and I agree Paterno is — struggle to make what seems to be the obvious right choice. Magary writes:

“That a great deal of people chose to do nothing after that is proof of how easily a cover-up can spontaneously take root and linger. We’d all like to think we’d do the noble thing when faced with such a seemingly obvious choice. The truth is, we might not. It’s impossible to read the Sandusky allegations and not get a vivid mental image of what took place. It’s enough to make you want to throw up, and I say that as someone who had a near miss with this sort of thing. It’s enough to make you cry out for blood and ask why no one did anything. The outrage comes naturally. But underneath that outrage, there is a real sadness and fear, the idea that ‘good’ people can still be hard-wired for self-preservation, even when faced with the ugliest truths. Even JoePa. Even you.”

Magary is right. I’d like to think that if I’d been Paterno or McQueary, I’d have done the right thing and immediately reported Sandusky to the authorities. However, I also know that while right and wrong in this case are black and white, would and should are both dangerously gray. I might’ve been in shock and worried about tumbling a football legacy — and having thousands of former and current Nittany Lions snarling for my hide (an inevitability proved last night). I might’ve not wanted to believe, after someone reported what he saw, that someone I was so close to was capable of such reprehensible behavior. I may have pretended to do the right thing but instead done just enough to keep everyone — well, unfortunately, almost everyone — happy.

And I would’ve been wrong. And while my behavior may have been understandable, the fact remains that with kids’ safety you’re either completely right or totally wrong.

It’s an unfair standard, one that’s almost impossible to meet. But when it comes to the children Sandusky victimized, perhaps everyone involved would’ve been better off being just a bit harder on themselves.

Conventional wisdom and common sense tell you that everyone has a 9/11 story. Some are terrifyingly honest, others are painfully heroic (too many to link to) but arguably all of them are compelling. There’s this new generation of kids though, these seventh- and eighth-graders whom I’ve become acquainted with through my other life, who have no memory of that day. They were 2, 3 and 4 years old. They’ve never seen footage of the towers falling. They’ve never seen the second plane hit the World Trade Center. To them, 9/11 is like how I remember the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin: It was a tragic thing and I remember hearing about it on the news while I was waiting to watch an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” That was it. People talk about it, but what does any of it mean? They were there but they weren’t really there.

And neither was I. I have vivid memories of Monday, Sept. 10 and Tuesday, Sept. 11 in 2001. I remember having a stuffy nose and losing my voice because I’d attended my first concert the Sunday prior. I remember falling asleep to U2′s “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of.” I remember being scared shitless of starting high school. One week in, the first Monday of the school year, still trying to craft an image impenetrable enough to protect whoever the fuck I actually was buried beneath the snark. Trying to trick the kids who’d come from other district middle schools into thinking I was cool.

I woke up early on Tuesday, Sept. 11. I had a student council meeting to attend. And yes, the sky was especially blue and clear in Minnesota too that morning. I sat silently in Spanish, my first class of the day, where I was one of the few freshman. I didn’t know ANYONE. I was so quiet that my teacher had to pick her jaw off the floor when I told her my favorite hobbies included talking to my friends on the phone.

With 10 or 15 minutes left in the period, my principal came over the loudspeaker, like so many principals in schools across America, and told us that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and teachers should turn their classroom TVs on. We all looked at each other, confused. My first thought: How does someone that dumb get to be a pilot? Who flies a plane into a building? He must have been drunk.

The rest of the day was spent floating from class to class, chattering about what it all meant between bells. Some teachers left their TVs on throughout the day. Others did not. In social studies, due to some particularly eerie scheduling, we had a world population expert lecture us. I remember my 13-year-old brain concluding, as that was my fourth-hour class and by then we’d determined this was terrorism and not pilot error, clearly the population guy had chosen to come to our school on this day because he was part of it. He knew ahead of time that this would all go down and he wanted to use it to strengthen his argument that the world was too crowded. Little did I know that I would be far from the only crackpot to come up with a 9/11 conspiracy theory — though unlike many others, I almost immediately disregarded mine.

Mostly, what I remember about 9/11 was — being the martyr and voice of reason — trying to comfort my peers. But I was annoyed. I wasn’t annoyed that I was being called on to make others feel better, I was peeved that this huge event — one I couldn’t begin to wrap my immature mind around — which affected our entire government, much of the world and the lives of people in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. (not to mention all of their family members) was reduced in my experience to selfish high-school freshmen complaining and crying about how it affected them. Not one of the classmates I counseled that day cried because of the loss of life or fear of safety. They made it about them. One girl was worried because she was “dating” a guy who lived in Pennsylvania, a whopping 100+ miles from Shanskville, where United Airlines Flight 93 plummeted to Earth, and wondered if he was alright. A lot of kids were shrieking about whether their dads, who worked in downtown Minneapolis skyscrapers, would be safe. And the whole time, I pretended to care and talked them down, but really I was pissed. They seemed selfish.

With 10 years of experience and yes, self-discovery, I realize that those students weren’t selfish. They were processing the tragedy and uncertainty the best way that they could. Who was I to roll my eyes at however they dealt with and reacted to 9/11? We were kids. We’d never seen anything like what we witnessed that morning, and haven’t since. We didn’t know how to grieve for strangers, so we did it through concern — which was actually very real — for our loved ones.

I was cynical because I’d already been jaded by my own personal tragedy. Weeks before the day that “changed everything,” I found out that my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was too old to be coddled and shielded from it — I sat and cried with her upon her diagnosis and went to visit her at the hospital following her double mastectomy — but I was too young and afraid to actually experience it. I buried myself in R.E.M. songs and episodes of “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” just waiting for her to heal.

I couldn’t really feel anything on Sept. 11. I was a young newshound/media junkie and was transfixed by all the coverage — I couldn’t believe MTV and Lifetime were showing news! — and I felt bad for the people who died and their families. But I was so removed from it, growing up in Minnesota and “patriotic” was never an adjective I’d affixed to myself — plus, I didn’t have a lot of sympathy to spread. I was too concerned with making sure my family held itself together and that my mom lived to see me finish my freshman year (she did and she’s still here).

On Sept. 11, I insensitively listened to “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” on a loop as I rode in a car with my parents as my mom ran some sort of cancer errand. I wasn’t totally trying to be funny, though I think maybe I was misguidedly employing some sort of cynical bite to cope with the day’s events, but I really didn’t know what else to do. I was so detached emotionally anyway, and so simultaneously consumed with and surrounded by despair, that mom getting cancer and a terrorist attack really seemed like two of the four horsemen.

I spent the rest of the evening of Sept. 11 on the phone with a friend whom I’ve written about — or libeled, depending on your perspective — frequently on this blog. I was watching MTV, which ran CBS news. I don’t know what FBF was watching and I don’t remember what we said, though I know we discussed the day’s events. I recall feeling guilty that I was 13 and thus too young to donate blood.

And that was it. Conan didn’t come on that night. Music videos aired all week on MTV and then patriotic-themed videos ran on a loop on both MTV and VH1 that weekend. I went to see “Glitter” in the theaters, I watched the America: A Tribute to Heroes telethon and the Concert for New York City. Life went on, my shows came back, the estimated death toll sank and my mom got healthier.

And that was it. In the 10 years that have passed, I’ve gained a lot more perspective on that September morning and am able to talk about it with much more emotional maturity and sympathy. But that wasn’t where I was at 13. And as I approached the 10th anniversary, bombarded with TV specials and commemorative magazine issues, I unconsciously began to regress. Listening to cuts from the “Glitter” soundtrack, finding myself lost in thought over that one friend with whom I debriefed with over the never-ending newscasts on that Tuesday night and having a little more concern about the health and stability of my family and its dynamics — these aren’t growing pains. This is my brain, backed into reliving its version of 9/11, trying to rewrite or repair history.

I’m choosing not to fight it. I’m lucky enough to have not known one person who perished on 9/11. Re-experiencing 9/11 for me means thinking about old friendships, TV and music. It doesn’t mean tragedy and post-traumatic stress. The thing I most want to do especially on this day is really grieve for those who didn’t have the luxury of being able to detach from the events of 9/11. I’m not too young to give blood, or money, or time, or cry tears.

Maybe it’s a good thing my brain decided to go back to 2001 without giving my self-consciousness a chance to get a head start.

I remind my well-meaning and wonderful friends of this every time they have a black male friend they want to me to date. I remind my less well-intentioned friends of this every time we’re out anywhere and they see another black person and comment how cute we’d be together, despite the fact that we know nothing about each other and all he did was open the door for us or walk by our table on the way to the bathroom.

I discovered this morning, courtesy of Jezebel and The Wall Street Journal, that apparently this way of thinking extends the other way: Black women need to open their eyes to dating outside their races if they want to save “black marriage.” It’s just that simple, posits author and Stanford Law School Professor Ralph Richard Banks, who is black, for the record.

“Black women can best promote black marriage by opening themselves to relationships with men of other races,” he writes. Oh, and here I thought black marriage included two black people. Silly me.

I'm a motherfuckin' martyr! (Courtesy of upscalehype.com)

Aside from that, Banks’ thesis seems flawed because after all, people aren’t laundry. I can’t just go to my local white-people gathering place, select my make and model and bring him home for a life of interracial bliss, complete with awkward stares from strangers and uncomfortable moments with our less open-minded relatives. But I’ll get to that later.

My real problem with Banks’ article is its overall intent: The idea that once again the black woman is being called on to exercise her agency for altruism, possibly at the expense of her own happiness and desires.

Little-known fact: Do you know what my friends love about me? It isn’t my ability to rap every verse of “Monster,” nor is it the way I make them feel progressive and accepting because they have a black friend. My friends’ favorite quality about me is actually about them: They love my compassion and the way I effortlessly solve their problems.

Who invited the token to this shindig? (Courtesy of threemuttsandababy.blogspot.com)

The compliment I’ve received most in my life is not about my physical beauty, my intellect or even my talent. It’s about how I’m such a good listener and I’ve always got such great solutions for interpersonal conflicts. I’m not a token; I’m a walking jump-to-conclusions mat.

In case you don’t believe me, here’s a little anecdotal evidence: When the infamous Fake Best Friend describes me to his friends, rather than discuss how I would and have done anything for him usually to my own detriment — including showing up at his house in footie pajamas to play Trivial Pursuit at 1 a.m. just to make him laugh or making him a care package when he broke his foot — he tells them about how compassionate I am and how easy I am to talk to. It sounds like a compliment, and it is. But it’s also a compliment that isn’t really about me. It’s the equivalent of saying that my favorite thing about my boyfriend is that now I don’t have to go anywhere alone.

Black women have spent their lives taking ones for the team. Don’t forget that my foremothers struggled to keep the black family intact as their fathers and husbands were sold away like property (because they were property). Then, in the face of poverty, disease and high imprisonment, the burden once again fell on black women to be sole breadwinners and make sure the black family unit survived.

The thread through all of this is that black women’s mission became larger than themselves. And now, with Banks’ call for our community to get a widespread case of jungle fever and solve our problems, once again black women are being blamed for a problem out of their control while simultaneously being told to solve it.

Banks isn’t totally wrong. I completely agree that as our country becomes more multi-cultural, despite Glenn Beck‘s and Bill O’Reilly‘s crusade to reverse it, everyone should be open to finding love outside their ethnicity. I’ve been looking outside my race for love since before I realized it was controversial.

I’ve discussed that for tokens a lot of times your surroundings will dictate your attractions. I grew up in a really white suburb in a really white state so almost all of my friends were white and all the guys I liked were white. I’ve blogged at great length about my love for men outside my race — Shaun White, Armie Hammer, Jon Hamm; I’m looking at you — but as En Vogue used to sing, “that doesn’t mean I don’t love my strong black brothers,” (ahem, Donald Glover).

My issue is with the matyrdom of black women. Once again, we’re being the caretakers.

While this may not be Banks’ m.o., the broader point about the importance of saving black marriage isn’t really about helping the black community, it’s about saving marriage for all. Banks supports using black women to fight the grander battle of bringing American marriage back from the brink.

American marriage is in sad shape folks. Half of marriages end in divorce. Six states have legalized gay marriage, as has Washington D.C., which is basically just poking a giant sassily waving finger in the eye of pearl-clutching family values fiends, ergo they assume marriage is on the downswing (though if more people are getting married and want to get married, I don’t see how that’s bad news for marriage, but that’s probably just because I don’t regard gay people as less than human). Plus, some straight people don’t have enough regard for marriage to try it out for longer than a few days.

I’m not speculating on Banks’ feelings about gay marriage or likening him to the people fighting against it. What I am suggesting is that the fight to save black marriage is being placed on the backs of black women to benefit more than themselves. This theory is allowing black women to become the vessels and their happiness is the casualty in the fight to restore and resurrect marriage. And I, as a black woman, am not willing to join in — certainly not until my ancestors get that 40 acres and the mule they were promised.

Not all black professional women are Sanaa Lathan's character in "Something New." A lot of us would be happy to find love with white men, but there aren't enough Simon Bakers to go around. (Image courtesy of thecinemasource.com)

More than that, Banks ignores an obvious point: He makes black women out to be demanding and narrow-minded, writing that we ”have needlessly worsened [our] situation by limiting [our]selves to black men.”

Well, men of other races who don’t think we’re attractive have certainly helped us be so needlessly limited in our options.

We live in a country where a somewhat-respected psychologist does a study regarding “why black women are substantially less attractive than women of other races” and a reputable website publishes the findings only to have the site’s editor in chief shocked enough by the blowback to remove the study and apologize.

Black women are not the gold medals in the dating pool, especially not for college-educated and high-earning males, particularly white ones. Yet magically, Banks glibly acknowledges and dismisses that reality:

“Numerous studies of Internet dating confirm that black women are the partners least desired by non-black men.But that’s not the whole story. Even if a majority of white men are uninterested in dating black women, that still leaves more than enough eligible white men for every single black woman in America.”

Somehow we’re supposed to be in control of that as well. We’ll fix it! Our minds will be open enough for both us and our not-so-eager white counterparts!

Here’s the truth: Plenty of black women are catches, myself included (and I know a few white guys who just might attest to that). The unmarried black female professional community, of which I’m a proud relatively new member, doesn’t need to be told that we should look not only for Cliff Huxtables, but Sandy Cohens, Phil Dunphys and George Lopezes.

I've already accepted that this may not be my future. Why aren't Kirsten and Sandy Cohen being asked to do the same? (Image courtesy of bourgieadventures.wordpress.com)

Single black women needing to open their minds and legs to people of all races is a small part of the battle. We don’t need nearly as much dating advice as we do good PR (no, “Single Ladies” and Madea movies don’t count.)

What we really need to do if we’re interested in saving marriage, and black marriage via interracial marriage, is talk to the people with the most power in this country, the people who take all the credit and very little of the blame: White men.

Where’s the article urging them to disregard “traditional” standards of beauty, the ideal family vision they’d foreseen, their friends and family members’ attitudes and their own preferences in the name of saving black marriage? Why aren’t more commentators taking to newsprint to tell white men it’s their duty to open their minds to make black women their spouses? After all, it takes two people to ruin their lives via matrimony. You might as well make a sociological stand while you do it.

I fantasize a lot about the day when I stop having to pretend that other people’s problems matter more than my own. Banks’ article is leading me to believe that this era won’t end until after my wedding day.

If that’s the case, then I’m refusing to marry my martyrdom.

I don’t.

Hartmann doesn’t really answer her own question, instead preferring to quote other bloggers before leaving it up to the commenters. Allow me to cut to the chase: Mercedes Jones doesn’t have a boyfriend because, if “Glee” was real life, Mercedes wouldn’t have a boyfriend.

Unfortunately, the romance between Puck and Mercedes was just a convenient and poorly executed plot point. (Image from mamapop.com.)

I know, I know, what’s on the inside is what counts and interracial relationships are totally kosher — we have a mixed-race president! — and all that Marlo Thomas “Free to be You and Me” babble. None of that really applies here, not even in the alternately hyper-real and mindlessly fabricated land of “Glee.” The show has done a really good job at times of portraying life in suburban Midwestern America, with its chain restaurants that feed patrons ’til they puke and the shared dream of all losers or even marginally talented people to one day escape white bread monotony. Another truth of that world, one crucial to the “Glee” universe, is that William McKinley High School is a place where people reject those who are different. At best, Lima, Ohio’s “freaks” are ignored or shuttered off to a conveniently contrived island utopia of acceptance, and at worst they are bullied or become self-loathing tormentors themselves.

For as much as “Glee” unashamedly gets wrong about high school — girls who get pregnant usually don’t effortlessly regain their places atop the social hierarchy, and don’t even get me started on how FIRED Will Schuester and Sue Sylvester would be at any other high school in this country — one thing the show manages to do right is demonstrate how staff and students at a traditional suburban high school in the Midwest wouldn’t know what to do with Mercedes either. Her dad is a dentist, she’s not “ghetto” but she is a diva and white kids like her. She wouldn’t easily fit into any clique because she’s a token.

I’ve said it before but in case you missed it, I was Mercedes Jones in high school. My dad isn’t a dentist and I couldn’t croak out an in-key note to save my life but as far as having attitude, not fitting into the stereotypes and being a plus-size queen, I was Mercedes. And guess what? I didn’t have a boyfriend.

Lisa Turtle was a conventionally attractive semi-token, hence why she was able to get some love from teen dream Zack Morris. (Image from Facebook.com).

I know two people don’t make a trend, and I’m sure there are plenty of fellow Meryncedeses roaming America’s halls with their significant others, but I bet more of us spent high school going to prom with our guy friends and dreaming about the day Zack Morris would arrive in our bedrooms to plant one on us.

I had a great time in high school. I wasn’t popular but I had enough friends, I got decent grades and my teachers liked me. Plus, it went by fast enough that I didn’t discover all the damage I’d inflicted on myself until I got to college. However, I didn’t have a boyfriend.

There are a lot of reasons why I didn’t date in high school. I was incredibly picky and totally banking on my fantasy that the Detroit Red Wings‘ Brendan Shanahan would marry me becoming reality, and I wasn’t really looking for a guy to call my own. I had crushes on plenty of dudes but in all honesty, I wouldn’t have known what to do had any of them reciprocated. I kept a lot of people at arm’s length in high school due to my token baggage, including and especially cute guys — most of whom were immature meatheads or had serious insecurities. (Why I couldn’t have just been attracted to any or all two of my well-adjusted male friends I’ll never know, though I think Troy Dyer is largely to blame.)

I’m sure the fact that I wasn’t coquettish or conventionally attractive — I was a prototypical “one of the guys” girl — certainly didn’t help my case. I liked guys who looked like Emile Hirsch and Armie Hammer – OK, my high-school crushes didn’t look like movie stars but they were cute white teens — guys immersed in a culture and everyday world full of girls who looked like Lauren Conrad or at most ethnic, Natalie Portman. If I’d looked like Beyonce or even Gabrielle Union I probably would’ve had more of a shot, but I looked like Amber Riley. And while I think Riley’s gorgeous, she’s not exactly the wet dream of most Midwestern teen guys on lacrosse teams.

Amber Riley is obviously fierce, but most guys from my high school would've opted for either one of the girls flanking her when it came to making those adolescent male fantasies into realities. Little known fact: Every straight guy I've polled about the hottest girl on "Glee" has answered Dianna Agron. (Image from chinawholesalelots.com)

And that’s the point. Mercedes, even with her pride, sass and wit, is not Quinn Fabray. Mercedes is not even Rachel Berry. For a guy at the predominately white McKinley High to date Mercedes, he’s not only got to get over his own baggage about being attracted to someone who isn’t conventionally attractive — and then face the wrath of his friends, an issue that sex columnist Dan Savage brilliantly articulates — he has to deal with her issues. Because Mercedes definitely has them.

“Glee” writers have done a masterful job of making Mercedes whomever they want her to be — a diva, a magical negro, Norma Rae for tater-tots — whenever they need her to be that person. But the truth is that the drama that comes along with Mercedes trying to date one of her peers regardless of race is that he’s probably got shallow, immature guy friends who will wonder why he isn’t dating Santana. And if he’s white, Mercedes would need to feel comfortable enough with him to not panic that in the heat of a fight he’ll hurl a racial slur at her. She’s got to know that he isn’t going to complain about the texture of her hair or ask questions about her weave. She’s got to be sure that he can tell his parents that they’re dating.

The list of token neuroses are endless, and it all gets complicated with the insecurities surrounding any first real relationship: wondering if you’re a good kisser, deciding how far to go physically, picking out what tune will be “your song” and whether or not you want to be one of those nauseating couples who hold hands in the halls.

I don’t know why “Glee,” with its writers’ blatant disregard for continuity and reality, have decided to hew so close to real life with Mercedes’ romantic predicament. My guess is that juggling so many popular characters and stories is tough, but maybe Miss Jones’ time in the spotlight will come.

However, part of me doesn’t want to see Mercedes partnered up due to one very big spoiler alert: “Glee” writers have no clue how to intelligently write plots around issues of race.

I’ve been looking for this show forever. It’s one of my favorite seasons. Who can forget Jason‘s sex appeal, Syrus‘ swagger and Montana‘s mindlessness (she cheated on Vaj AND she gave alcohol to a young child she was supervising)? Plus, so far Boston’s cast is the only one to yield a United States congressman, though I haven’t given up on Puck‘s electoral chances. My favorite member of the Boston septet was the driven Kameelah. Assertive, articulate and the house’s ultimate token, Kameelah was my idol.

She was notorious for telling it like it is. As some dudes whispered in the hopes of getting her attention at a public transit station, she fiercely walked over to them and said four empowering words, “My name is Kameelah.” She was a woman, not some girl who you catcall. Plus at 19, she was one of the younger people in the house and from the beginning was honest about not drinking.

“I don’t put alcohol in my body,” she said ON THE FIRST DAY.

At 19, I more than liked Kameelah. I was Kameelah.

This is who the token becomes when she stops being polite and starts getting real. (Photo from MTV.com)

OK, so I wasn’t Kameelah. I just silently made fun of the guys who catcalled me, usually mocking them as I showered to get their stink off my skin. I didn’t drink when I was 19 either — I waited until age 21 just as Uncle Sam and Johnny Law mandated — but I wasn’t tough about it. People offered me drinks and I usually rejected them politely, making it sound like it was a one-time objection, or I more often muttered something sarcastic about not having a liver.

But I’m all grown up now or something. So why is the One Unique Token rallying to save a reality franchise that, in terms of quality, is down to the final petal on the rose?

Because we NEED “The Real World.” I write that with the firm belief that almost all of the seasons from the show’s last decade are downright deplorable. But I also know this: I’m not the world’s only Kameelah wannabe, and I surely won’t be the last.

I didn’t model my life after Kameelah, nor do I encourage anyone to do something because you saw some reality show participant do it first. But it was nice to have an attainable and relatable TV role model, especially during my childhood and the mid-90s, when there were two universes on television: One containing the worlds of “Seinfeld” and “Friends” with people I emulated but never resembled, (people with my skin tone were either guest stars or not represented at all) and the universe of “Martin” and “Living Single,” where I looked like everyone but talked like and thought like no one.

The highly diverse (in various ways) cast of my favorite season of "The Real World." Im still clinging to the hope MTV will release the show on DVD. (Image from iml.jou.ufl.edu).

The mid-90s glory days of “The Real World,” with its mission to depict people when they “stop being polite and start getting real,” bridged the gap in some ways. It’s a common meme (and the source of some hilarious satire) to say that each cast member fit into certain archetypes every season, and they did to some degree, but those archetypes were often jumping off points. What was really so great about those seasons was seeing people get into actual discussions about the differences between people.

Current iterations of “The Real World” feel horribly contrived. The recipe now seems to be:

7 really hot (and seemingly different) strangers

Unlimited booze

A hot tub

Contrived conflicts

Shake until combustion. Voila: Ratings Gold.

“The Real World” of today masquerades as intelligent and progressive social commentary, but it’s less controversial than ever because it’s more artificial than ever. On “The Real World: Denver” gay white southern Christian frat bro Davis hurls the n-word at token black stud housemate Tyrie. Trenchant social commentary, eh? Hardly. Tyrie forgives him by the end of the episode and there’s no real discussion of why racial slurs are so potent and why Davis’ upbringing and background may have led his drunk self to believe words like that are OK. Instead everyone held hands and learned that racial slurs are naughty but make for great ratings. I swear this was almost the same narrative arc as an episode of “A Different World,” only done much worse and almost two decades too late on MTV.

Back in Boston, in a private interview, Texas-bred Elka tells the camera she knew her roommate Kameelah would be black because the name “screamed black.” To me that’s a much more honest depiction of ignorance. Most people I’ve met who hold outdated ideas about race aren’t raging bigots; they’re people who don’t know any better. Most of the racist comments I’ve heard came from people who believed they were open minded, people who wanted to learn but hadn’t been exposed to the world yet to realize that it’s not kosher to tell the world you think someone is black because her name is Kameelah.

MTV has reduced its reality potion to include only its key ingredients on their purest levels. Casting for “The Real World” now seems to rely on getting a bunch of stereotypes in a room to see how much they’ll fuck and fight. Let’s get the rural Christian virgin whose never been drunk and liquor her up so she’ll lose it to the aetheist boy from the big city. Go! Let’s get an insecure feminine straight guy and see if he’ll threaten the confident gay guy!

The only season that rivals "The Real World: Boston" for sheer awesomeness and social commentary is this one, the cast of "The Real World: Seattle." In the lower center and right-hand corner are Irene and Stephen, in happier and less-violent times. (Photo from MTV.com)

I’d much rather see the slap heard round the world, and not just because it’s a moment of unfettered and ultimately disturbingly entertaining drama. When Stephen slapped Irene in Seattle because she called him a homosexual, it was shocking. Not only that, it was a moment of real human behavior. No one could blame that on the crutch of alcohol. The truth is that Irene cracked under the insane stress of having her every move filmed and Stephen, a then-closeted homosexual, was struggling with the pain of denying his true sexual identity. That is so much more powerful and penetrating than having a transperson in the cast as insta-conflict. Stephen was discovering his identity (which included anger management issues that Stephen had to deal with on camera in counseling as a direct result of his actions involving Irene) in front of MTV’s audience. Katelynn, of “The Real World: Brooklyn” was just a drop of Alka Seltzer in a premixed Molotov cocktail. The producers should’ve explored her personality and struggles as a trans adult, but instead she was a just another source of controversy and another token for the producers to cross off their list of groundbreaking cast members.

It’s not totally the producers’ fault though; the biggest problem with the current incarnations of “The Real World” is that they’re populated by cast members who grew up watching “The Real World.”

We need a return to the original intent of “The Real World” because our country is polarized and paralyzed. We’re being taught there’s a real America and another, assumedly anti-America within the United States. Instead of being forced — metaphorically by a camera crew following you and your polar opposites for four months as you live together – to learn about how the other half lives, we’re just surrounding ourselves with like-minded peers and demonizing the “others.”

The cast responsible for the rapid descent of "The Real World." Ugh, "The Real World: Las Vegas" is the worst thing to happen to MTV, reality TV and quite possibly all TV. (Photo from icydk.com).

I’m not naive enough to say that bringing back the original intent behind “The Real World” will make the world a better place or even change lives. I am saying that, with a media landscape so focused on the us vs. them and opposing ideologues trading low blows, it would be a beneficial change of pace to show arguments with a little more nuance, where people are more than the sum of their political positions and people are ignorant and unaware, not simply bigots and birthers. The ’90s cast members of “The Real World” for the most part were pretty average; they weren’t smarter or more articulate than anyone else, they just wanted to be on TV. And in a country where the Internet and an insatiable appetite for reality TV has made everyone a potential star, wanting to be on TV isn’t exactly a fringe desire.

Ultimately we’re a nation of housemates on “The Real World: America.” The liberals aren’t leaving and neither are the conservatives. You may not believe in gay marriage but that can’t stop a gay couple from living in your neighborhood. The least you can do is try to learn to coexist peacefully.

For the record, there’s no better model of this than Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.). He’s as conservative as they come — though I was pleased to see he voted against defunding National Public Radio — but even he figured out how to live with and respect his lesbian housemate Genesis. He even got along with Kameelah.

It's a trumpet! Yeah, I don't see it either. (Image from magiceye.com).

I find that a lot of my very well-meaning, and not-as-well-intentioned, white friends give me blank stares when we discuss white privilege. This isn’t exactly a shock for me because if you’ve never had to consider your race, it’s hard to believe or understand the ways in which you unconsciously benefit from it. But if you’re a token and you’re constantly reminded of the ways you’re almost good enough — that your parents’ house is almost big enough and your diction is almost acceptable — instances of white privilege involving your friends just become little personal secrets, like the images in Magic Eye posters; they appear effortlessly to some people while others, no matter how hard they squint, can’t see what’s seemingly right in front of them.

Many people, regardless of race, understand what discrimination looks like: salespeople following customers of color when they enter stores makes a racism red flag go off in all but the most aloof or ignorant individuals. Same goes for instances of racial profiling in police stops or airport searches. I give my wonderful white friends credit for being able to identify racism when they see it (and often being upset about it).

White privilege, on the other hand, is harder to spot. It doesn’t wear a neon sign and they usually don’t make very special episodes of “Smart Guy” about it. For the token, it’s tough when you realize that your enlightened, well-intentioned and supposedly racially aware friends don’t see just how entitled they are — often because of factors entirely out of their control. I don’t want to speak for my friends, but I imagine it’s hard to think that you’ve benefitted from racism when you are so against it and feel you don’t do anything to perpetuate it. After all, your best friend is black! But no matter how many people tell you the Magic Eye poster reveals a sailboat, if you can’t see it you just can’t see it.

My roommate didn’t see it when she, irked that I got a bigger room than she did because she signed the lease last (after another roommate left the arrangement and forfeited the larger suite), suggested we trade rooms halfway through our time living together. Was she a racist? I don’t think so and, for the record, race never entered into the discussion. However I couldn’t help but think, as we politely talked about why I was not interested in moving all of my possessions next door in the name of “fairness,” that the conversation took on an odd tone.

"Excuse me, Mrs. Draper. Your white privilege is showing." Carla can see it and it's probably what got her fired. (Image from forharriet.com).

Racism is about superiority vs. inferiority. White privilege is about entitlement, both conscious and unconscious. I’m a big “Mad Men” fan, obviously, but I’m not prepared to say that Betty Draper Francis is a racist. However, she is a very clear beneficiary of white privilege and her shrieks of “I’m entitled to this!” as she defends her pointless and emotional decision to fire Carla, her black maid, seem to tell us so.

So when my roommate said it’s only fair that we each get to have the larger room for the same amount of time, what I heard was: “I’m entitled to the same things you are. That’s fair.” Well, Merriam-Webster aside, I take issue with her application of the word fair. To her, “fair” means “equal,” but to someone constantly pining for equality, those words are the furthest of antonyms. Fairness is a hard concept to grasp in a world that tells you your wages will be lower than your counterparts, cops will pull you over more frequently and your access to healthcare will be limited all because of your skin color, something completely out of your control. That’s not fair, but I wasn’t raised to believe life would be fair. That’s what white privilege looks like.

One place white privilege often hides is in pop culture. It pops up when a white grad student, with a straight face, tells a black guest that Kanye West is not a reliable authority on race relations and race issues in America. White privilege is telling a black person which cultural icons are allowed to represent the struggles of her race (and thereby her own hardships).

An unfortunate side effect of being able to spot white privilege is that it sometimes makes me judge people really harshly, like when I was with my fake best friend (FBF) one night.

“I don’t think Oprah is a very nice person,” FBF said.

Now, I’m not an Oprahfile but I saw a fair level of hypocrisy in my FBF, someone who idolizes David Letterman, impugning Ms. Winfrey’s character. After all, say what you want about O; she’s not the one who had to apologize for having inappropriate sexual relationships with staff members.

Bill Carter, a writer employed by arguably the most prestigious newspaper in the county, wrote not one but two thick books detailing the ways Letterman treats his staff; methods include failing to make eye contact and not acknowledging employees in passing or in otherwise empty elevators. Meanwhile, known swill merchant Kitty Kelley wrote a discredited book on Oprah and her lack of people skills.

“I’d argue that Oprah is probably seen as not a nice person in part because she’s black and a woman. I doubt she’s any worse to her staff than David Letterman is,” I shot back.

I was uninterested in my FBF’s reply. I wasn’t in the mood for an ignorant mea culpa, no matter how kind-hearted.

Oprah Winfrey and David Letterman can get along, but I just can't see past my fake best friend's ignorance sometimes. I just get blinded by the white (privilege). (Image from TVGuide.com).

Letterman is notorious for throwing tantrums and being snippy and generally unapproachable. I think the man’s a genius and for the most part I don’t care how nice he is or who he sleeps with, but I take issue with the idea that  Letterman’s behavior is excusable and acceptable while Oprah’s less-documented transgressions are not. Clearly my FBF hadn’t realized the holes in his argument until I brought up that perhaps his differing views on the two personalities might have something to do with white privilege and the way society treats women and people of color. But when you’re a white male and you don’t pay attention to race relations and don’t understand or acknowledge white privilege, it makes sense to have a double standard about Oprah and Dave, even if you don’t realize it’s implicitly at least partially based on race and gender.

Oprah and Dave may have put their beef to rest years ago but I’m still seething about my FBF’s ignorance in the face of obvious white privilege. To me, it reinforced all the reasons why he, as a white male, could never really cut me enough slack or be as good a friend as I ever wanted him to be. It showed me that, somewhere deep in his psyche — whether he wanted to admit it or was even aware of it — I just wasn’t worthy of the same kind of friendship I gave to him. He was entitled to my friendship. I was supposed to be merely a grateful beneficiary of him deigning to keep me around.

The thing about white privilege is this: It doesn’t exist without people of other colors to be crushed under its weight.

These situations aren’t absolute. White privilege can’t be proven with litmus paper or spotted by a microscope, and I’m just as flawed as anyone else. I bet if I’d posed this hypothesis to any of the aforementioned individuals, they wouldn’t stop to breathe before shooting down my statements with a barrage of politically correct justifications. That makes them great people. It doesn’t, however, make either of us right.

When it comes to white privilege, unfortunately I have to take a note from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart‘s playbook: “I know it when I see it.”

Dear Whoopi,

I was hanging out in Heaven, eating some candy hearts for Valentine’s Day, when someone passed along a link to you complaining on “The View” (or as we call it up here, “The Bitching Hour”).

After watching your rant and reading the article in question, I have to ask: Have you lost your mind?

It breaks my heart to see how incredibly you’ve missed the point, how horribly you’ve misdirected your outrage. Aside from the fact that the authors didn’t incorrectly exclude you anymore than they excluded Louis Gossett, Jr., Prince, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and the other African Americans — it feels good to refer to us as that now, especially considering what they use to call us back in my day — who won Oscars prior to 2001, when Denzel Washington and Halle Berry made history.

I think you were used to reading about yourself every time these “Black Actors at the Oscars” stories come up — face it, they’re basically the equivalent of the “Abraham Lincoln: Still Dead” evergreen at this point — and noticed that your name was absent. What you didn’t do is read carefully enough to see that it was a stylistic choice and not an error or a mistatement of fact.

You think being left out of an article that wasn’t even about you is hard? Try having your most famous role be that of a slave. Now that’s hard! (Sorry to mimic Sue Sylvester but I just love “Glee,” though I wish they’d do more with Mercedes than make her a magical negro.)

Monday morning, you invoked my name in your rant about how the Times critics “dismissed” and “erased” your Oscar win. But I looked back at your old Oscar speech and you didn’t mention me at all. I don’t think it was on purpose. It was probably an oversight and not a callous attempt to dismiss the trail I blazed for you. How about this: I’d appreciate it if when you use my name to make a point, make sure the argument is about us and not you.

Whoopi, be glad they even let you be on TV. They let you have your own sitcom where you were a producer. I had my own sitcom, where I played a maid and had NO creative control. You were nominated for two Oscars, one of which you won. Your characters, Oda Mae Brown and Celie Johnson, each had more than one name, unlike mine (I’m not even sure Mammy was my character’s name, I think it was a title). You even got to host the Oscars — FOUR TIMES. Don’t forget, sweetheart: I didn’t even get to sit with my peers when I won the Oscar. I was seated in a segregated section.

And I know how far we’ve come. Listen, I’m really appreciative of all you’ve done to further black comedians (and comediennes) and all the progress you’ve made for black women in Hollywood. I watched you win your Oscar in 1991 with tears in my eyes, the precipitation of pride. And even though you’re not really acting anymore — though I howl with laughter each and every time I see you on “30 Rock” — I still have great fondness for you. You’re out there being positive, outspoken and thoughtfully advocating for others and the causes you believe in, no matter how much trouble it gets you into.

Whoopi, you are a gift. You are my heir in so many ways. You didn’t have to play the slave. You got your Oscar – and a well-deserved nomination — by playing characters far more empowered, fleshed-out and independent than I had the luxury of playing, than I ever could have dreamed of being able to play. So why are you tainting your legacy with this hissy fit?

Myself and Mo'Nique on the nights of our Oscar wins. (Image from freckledcitizen.com)

I don’t think you missed the point on purpose. My guess is that you’ve taken your eye off the ball. I’m not dumb; I know there are still so many struggles black women — whether in the home or Hollywood — have to endure. I know many of us are still heading households alone, and have limited access to healthcare and a long way until we reach pay equity. And it breaks my heart to see that, 20 years after your Academy Award triumph and one year after the lovely Mo’Nique paid tribute to me as she won the very same Oscar I received, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has taken a significant slide backward with the whitest Oscars (in acting) in 10 years. You should be mad. We should all, regardless of race, be mad. But somehow, in your comments yesterday, that didn’t appear to be the source of your frustration. You invoked my name and made it about you. You said “it hurt me terribly.” You said “it’s hard not to take it personally.” And when you shifted the focus from the drought of Oscar-worthy and Academy-noticed roles for Blacks in Hollywood to yourself, you also took the attention of your hundreds of thousands of viewers — the people who can help make a difference — with you.

But Whoopi, it’s not about you. It’s not even about me, Denzel, Halle, A.O. Scott or Manohla Dargis. It’s about mankind’s collective struggle toward equality, a fight played out in the microcosm of Black Hollywood. It’s about the work we still have to do and how frustrating it is that after all the progress we’ve made, some days we wake up to find we’re still Sisyphus.

So Whoopi, I don’t mind you screaming from your soapbox about your causes and your feelings. And I’ll always be proud of all you’ve achieved — proud enough to even forgive you for “Eddie.” But the next time you trot out that little gold statuette, the one you worked so hard to earn, the one denied to so many people who looked like us and may have even deserved it more we did, make sure you raise that Oscar with the weight of Black Hollywood’s legacy and not your own ego. I promise more people will take your protest seriously if you do.

Love,

Hattie McDaniel

*Hattie McDaniel, as you may know or have guessed, spun off this mortal coil long ago. So you’ve found out our secret: Ms. McDaniel did not, I repeat, did NOT actually write this letter. I used her persona for satire. Cool?