Ok, I don’t read Slate outside of Hitchens much because, well, I’m not a pseudo-intellectual poseur. But this article was brought to my attention in which some jackass argues that mentioning Barack Obama’s thin build is crypto-bigotry. What genius detective work in uncovering that racist code! I mean, we’ve all heard backwoods southern cops commenting with dripping scorn about “that buncha skinnies on the corner.” And the Klan’s just constantly talking about “uppity skinnies.” His evidence that skinniness has always been a salient, virulent metonym for blackness in America? Some dialogue from a 1975 anti-racist episode of Happy Days. A searing indictment of Jim Crow in, uh, Milwaukee! Next week: “Homophobic subtexts in the depiction of ‘The Bicycle Man,’ a so-called “Very Special” two-part episode of Diff’rent Strokes. For God’s sake, take a deep breath and back away from the Macbook, you idiot.

I guess this is a sign of racial progress that genuine, naked bigotry is so rare that this sort of cabbalistic discernment of triple-secret crypto-bigotry is somehow deemed credible. A black man in America between, say, 1700 and 1950 would never have believed that this was the alleged invective hurled at his people. “Oh, he called him ‘skinny?’ Must be a lynching afoot.” This is idiotic white-guilt-upsmanship with one white guy trying to attack another white person for being a bigot, using Barack Obama—United States Senator, front-runner to be the next President of the United States—as a helpless, voiceless mascot who needs some webzine hipster to ride to his rescue to save him from the cross-burning hordes at the Wall Street Journal. Could this be any more absurd? Or condescending to black Americans? Notice to white people: next time you want to be an anti-racist crusader, ask a damn black person if you’re just smoking a big ol’ crack pipe of your own self-righteousness.

And as far as Obama’s being skinny? No freaking kidding. His father was a Luo. Luos are a Western Nilotic people. In general, Nilotic peoples are…well, let me drop a little science on y’all:

“…Nilotes…are markedly more restricted and dominated by extreme somatotypes than the distribution of the nationality samples.…The Nilotes are strikingly endomorphic, with many extreme ectomorphs.” Somatotyping-development and Applications: Development and Applications, J. E. Lindsay Carter, Barbara Honeyman Heath, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 91.

Let me translate and apply to the present case: Half of Obama’s genes come from some of the skinniest people on Earth. Now, Luo aren’t quite as tall and thin as Manute Bol’s Dinkas or the Maasai. But, so? He’s skinny! End of damn story.

Want evidence? Go through this site.

The Volgi is going to call in Handy for this one.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.