Somewhere before White Fragility became the lingo du jour of anti-racism workshops, white people stopped telling me out loud that they were ‘one of the good ones’. They chuckled and said ‘Oh, I’m so white’. They offered me a conspiring wink. It’s not as suave when I reciprocate. I can only blink, or hold my hand over one eye like an optometrist, testing just what it is I’m meant to be seeing.

They said ‘Oh, I’m so white’ eating chillies—which serrate my bowels. They said it getting sunburned—while I put on sunscreen next to them. They howled it while being bad dancers—my arms flailing vaguely to the same music. Hearing them, you’d wonder when whiteness became an in-joke, rather than, as Cheryl Harris wrote for Harvard Law Review in the year I was born, ‘a type of status in which white racial identity provided the basis for allocating societal benefits both private and public in character’. Or, as Nell Irvin Painter writes in her 2010 work The History of White People, a personal and collective identity that barely bears thinking about for its cherished invisibility and horror, somewhere between ‘nothingness and awfulness’.