Though I firmly believe that the bulk of a conservative’s time engaging liberal arguments should be spent debating their most pointed, nuanced positions, we should occasionally indulge ourselves by reveling in their worst arguments and fringe elements. Fringe elements like Ali Michael, who took to the pages of the Huffington Post this week to help us all cope with the, and I quote, “overwhelming oppressiveness of our whiteness”.

To call the piece’s logic tortured is to downplay its severity. The article is a war crime committed against rational thinking. At its core is the assumption that sin is transmitted from the actual perpetrators to their progeny. Whites are not merely beneficiaries of a form of privilege, but literally share partial blame for acts of injustice committed long before their birth. Social Justice is a jealous god, who visits the inequities of the (white) father onto, at minimum, the third and fourth generations.

Rachel Dolezal is a fascinating case study in White racial identity development.* She is stuck in the immersion/emersion stage, in which White people, having learned extensively about the realities of racism, and the ugly history of White supremacy in the U.S., “immerse” themselves in trying to figure out how to be White in our society, and “emerge” with a new relationship to Whiteness.