So AIDS Gets A Holiday But White People Don’t?

Today (or yesterday, depending on when this is published. Let’s just say December 1st) is International AIDS Day. A day in which we’re all supposed to stop what we’re doing and make ourselves “aware” of AIDS for 24 hours, as if AIDS isn’t a constant threat for those of us that constitute Generation Fuck.

You think I’m not aware of AIDS? The amount of dangerous ecstasy fueled sex I’ve had is enough to warrant the Surgeon General’s Warning tattooed on my inner thigh by court order. I don’t use protection. Who the fuck uses protection? I’m certainly not going to body shame a man into thinking his penis isn’t good enough without a condom, and I don’t want him thinking the same about my vagina. Condoms are lies. AIDS is real though, and I don’t need or want or know how to allocate a specific day to contain all of my AIDS fear. I’m consumed by it, and giving fear its own date on the calendar is borderline offensive.

But like everything and everyone, AIDS needs its own little special day. Everything gets a day or a month now – everything except white people. Which doesn’t make much sense, considering white people have killed a hell of lot more people than AIDS ever will. If AIDS, as an incurable, horrific disease gets its own day, shouldn’t white people?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about a day of celebration. Just a day of awareness. A day to remind people that white people are out there, they’re armed, and there still isn’t a cure.

One of the most annoying aspects of any kind of identity-specific holiday or celebratory month is the inevitable backlash from the white male community concerning their implied exclusion. Every year, Black History Month, with its resplendent Kente cloth and McDonald’s branded trivia about peanuts and bus seating, finds itself rife with cries of inequality, ironically coming from men who are the reason Black History Month exists – by which of course I mean racist white men. Now, they wouldn’t dare call themselves racist – nowadays outright bigotry is déclassé even among angry internet men – so instead of being forthright with their prejudice, they’ll mask their disdain for other races with a gossamer veil of insincere concern over equitable allocation of collective reverence.

Oh, I’m not mad about Black History Month, they’ll say, I just have a problem with special treatment; I just want there to be a history month for everyone. They’ll huff and puff about the “real racists” but despite their assertions, not a single one continues to advocate for a White History Month as soon as March rolls around. By then they’ve forgotten about it, and they can go back to finding outrage in a picture of the President wearing a lapel pin wrong in the presence of The Beloved Troops, forwarded to them by another member of their gun club for pre-diabetics. What happened boys? Don’t you still want your precious fucking month? Guess not. Seems the only way White History Month could possibly exist is if it were also in February, stepping in front of and edging out Black History Month like a bloated glutton, sucking at the teat of public attention. A parasite even. A virus if you will. Whiteness is a virus.

Is there any real doubt that Whiteness is a virus? It’s spread throughout the world, sapping natural resources and exhaustively proving its inability to reach an equipoise. Even now, the most pervasive and malignant strains of Whiteness are working to obfuscate the impact of climate change. As it literally destroys the world, the Whiteness trumpets its own accomplishments as justifiable trade-offs. Sure there’s holes in the atmosphere, but the trucks have Sirius in them now, some even have Spotify. Who cares about glaciers when we have Spotify in our trucks? Just what purpose does that serve other than an agenda of ruinous consumption? It’s a purely viral impulse, and sinister and deceptive to boot. Say what you want about AIDS, at least it doesn’t pretend to be a vitamin.

Whiteness is AIDS on crack. Quite literally. It’s the AIDS and crack epidemics of the 1980s, created purely by a white supremacist administration that ignored the problems until they affected the virus itself. In a way, drug addiction and AIDS are just symptoms of Whiteness. So are greed and aggression, and with the mid-century dealbation of the American Irish, alcoholism and suicide also joined the immeasurable list of symptoms. Death itself is a symptom. To be white is to be complicit in universal human suffering. To be white is to be an unwitting viral load, an infection, a bit of DNA that, coupled with copies of itself, contribute to a systemic problem that serves one purpose and one purpose only: to kill the planet.

So if AIDS gets its own day, why the hell don’t white people?