There is apparently some controversy brewing over at The Whities. Some folks are upset that a hat marketer/retailer is peddling lids featuring a caricature of a little bitty white dude rather than hideously offensive images of Native Americans. It is worth mentioning that Chief Wahoo, the beloved mascot of the Cleveland Indians baseball club, and the fellow upon whom Whitey is based, is copied after a once-super-popular back-in-the-day Anti-Semitic image, which, coincidentally, looks exactly like my cousin.

The first way of looking at this is that WASPs had it coming after decades of making sport literally of not-WASPs by way of mascots and minstrel shows. That’s an attractive approach, no doubt; however, its also a petulant bullshit baby-boomer approach, which delights in the comeuppance of the perceived powerful, and wallows in white guilt.

Another way is to shrug altogether and ignore it, as most white folks would, as yet an additional example of how people with bad tastes and low senses of humor take great advantage of the majority’s gritted-teeth tolerance where racism on the parts of minorities are concerned.

The proper way of looking at this is for white folk who might otherwise get miffed to embrace Whitey, and consider his arrival in invitation to the great interplay of humor, playful stereotype and gentle ribbing that are so integral to many non-white communities. Perhaps Whitey can help us get over white guilt and cognitive inconsistency regarding our perceptions of “others,” and we might all, once and for all, put down our off-kilter dialogues about race, laughter and by whose abritrary, unwritten and ever-changing rules we engage those very human things.