This week’s missive was originally written for The Huffington Post. I hope that, despite that elitist, liberal provenance, you will enjoy it anyway.

Race has been at issue throughout the 2008 presidential election, and particularly in the Democratic contest between Bill Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.* The tension reached its boiling point last week in South Carolina, so The Huffington Post has asked me, as an expert in racial issues, to explain to its readers exactly what happened in this past weekend’s primary.

CNN’s Randi Kaye raised, perhaps, the most intriguing question of the election when she wondered aloud, the Monday before the primary, how the black female vote would fall out. In the article, titled “Gender or race: Black women voters face tough choices in S.C. primary,” the news network correctly pointed out that a difficult choice faced this freakish, hybrid niche vote. “For these women,” the article points out, “a unique, and most unexpected dilemma, presents itself: Should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?”

Throughout the history of this country, voters have only voted based on their race, which is why all of our presidents have been white males. Except for Rutherford B. Hayes, who was, technically, a Sasquatch. This allowed voters to focus on the issues, like who had the most impressive sideburns, and who would do the most to keep out the Chinamen. The majority of Americans are white Protestants and, except for a brief, regrettable lapse in the early 1960s, they have always voted for their own kind. (Another near-catastrophe was narrowly averted in 2004 when the Papist John Kerry was photographed windsurfing.)

So the presence of a female candidate has, understandably, confused things quite a bit. A slim majority of Americans are women, and an even larger majority of Democrats are, which would suggest that Hillary Clinton is a shoo-in for the nomination. But gender isn’t as simple as race—as I’ve learned in my extensive field research on the subject, most women hate each other. They see other females as competition for men and shoes, and therefore obstacles to their own fulfillment.

Furthermore, in an increasingly multiracial world, quandaries like that facing black women in South Carolina have multiplied. Who, after all, should a half-Hispanic, half-Black, half-Woman citizen cast their vote for?** To add to the confusion, Democratic voters have a surfeit of acceptably PC options to choose among, with a white woman, a black man, and, according to Ann Coulter, a gay man.

Nonetheless, history and logic both suggest that Hillary Clinton should have won. How, then, do we account for the fact that every single relevant demographic in South Carolina voted for Senator Obama? Simple—South Carolina voters just proved what the rest of us have known for a long time: Democrats are irrational. After all, what right-thinking American would ever vote for a candidate who will raise taxes in order to pay for recreational abortions, or who pledges to legislate mandatory sodomy?

Luckily, the Republican side offers several attractive options. Except for the Mormon… and the Italian. And the old, Immigrant-loving cripple. In any case, I think it’s clear that everyone can get behind Ron Paul.

*It has been the most racially charged primary season since Adlai Stevenson defeated Estes Kefauver for the Democratic nomination based entirely on the platform, “Estes Kefauver? Doesn’t that sound like a Jewish name to you?”

**Mike Gravel.

Hello again. C.H. Dalton here – that’s Professor Dalton to my students who are reading this.

The other night, I was using my TV’s “picture-in-picture” function to keep an eye on the Republican presidential debate, while also watching one of my favorite movies, which was airing on AMC. It was while my cup was overflowing with these entertainment options that I noticed something shocking. I realized that former Mayor Rudolph “Rudy” Giuliani… is more human than human.

Eerie, isn’t it?

Right now it’s looking like Giuliani—the quadrennial “Americans can’t be that stupid, can they?” candidate—is pretty much out of the running, but what a rollercoaster ride while it lasted!

I hope this has been informative. For the most part I ignore politics, unless a candidate like Ron Paul pledges to legalize hate crimes, so you’re lucky I caught this one.

C.H. Dalton here, fresh off my whirlwind speaking tour of the Rhineland. It was a lovely holiday, but now I’m back amidst the proles, and life must go on. So this week, I’d like to talk a little bit about nature’s negative space: women.

The old song says, “there is nothing like a dame.” And thank God for that. Women are nature’s third-most disgusting phenomena, after sea anemones and “Two Girls, One Cup.”

I was betrothed once, as a young man. My parents engaged me to the daughter of a rival family, in an attempt to broker peace between our clans. She was six years old at the time, and it is my great good fortune that she did not live to reach the marrying age of 13. (Picnic, lightning, equine encephalitis.)

The little creature cared nothing for science or opera, and was barely conversant in classical Greek. It would have been a terrible match. I consider it a fitting epilogue that my father’s Masonic brethren burned her family’s cannery to the ground and had her parents deported to Lebanon. (They were Irish.)

It was an instructive experience, though. My brief courtship with that pre-pubescent succubus taught me a great deal about the Female race. (It is one of several “sexual ethnicities,” defined by sexual preference and genital configuration.) For starters, that they are weak, irrational, and small.

When I say that I prefer the company of men, as I often do, I do not mean that in the Greek sense. I don’t know where people get that idea. I am just saying that I would much rather have a conversation with a good-natured, robust gentleman about the beaux arts or male grooming, than be lectured about the latest vegan frozen foods product or suffrage movement. And God, to think of the messy interchange of bodily fluids…

I don’t like doing laundry, and I don’t like having to talk about princesses or brassieres. It’s just that simple. Of course, as with all the other races, I say, “live and let live.” (I personally disagree with Paul McCartney’s interpretation of that doctrine.)

Of course, I still find women sexually attractive, with their nipples and their labias and whatnot. I just think they’re physically repulsive and unnecessarily gooey. But that doesn’t mean anything—I mean, just look at the magazines on my coffee table: Men’s Health, Muscle & Fitness, Details, Boy’s Life. I mean, come on, where do these rumors get started?

Anyway, everyone knows that the only way that one can get gay is if it’s passed down patrilineally, and my father was a true man’s man. Always spending nights and weekends personally supervising the workers at his steel mill or down by the docks he owned.

Ahem. Well, that’s all for this week. Come back next week for another one of my extremely manly, virile missives.

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“It’s a filthy Aboriginal!”

No, I’m just having some fun with you. It’s me, C.H. Dalton, and this week I’d like to talk a little bit about jokes.

Some people think that race and racism aren’t funny. These touchy people—mostly minorities and homosexuals—think that we shouldn’t make light of the discrimination and hatred that pervade our society. Well to them, I say: “grow up, Jew!”

Racialist jokes have been part of American culture since its very inception. For example, there’s this bon mot from the Federalist Papers:

Q: Why do Jews have such big noses?
A: Because air is free.

And not long after, Francis Scott Key wrote this priceless paradox into his “Star-Spangled Banner”:

“The biggest Jewish dilemma? Free ham.”

I believe he rhymed it with “Uncle Sam.”

Some people object to ethnic humour because they’re unfamiliar with it, or because they’ve only heard bad racist jokes. For these unfortunate souls, I recommend a trip to your local library or Klan headquarters to sample one of the many popular race-specific joke books available for browsing.

Others think that racist humour is too “easy,” and that it reductively singles out only one stereotype about a culture, like “Jews are parsimonious,” or “the Irish are drunks.” But that’s simply not true. Good ethnic jokes take advantage of many different stereotypes for their subject matter. For example:

Q: What's three miles long and has an IQ of 63?
A: A Saint Patrick's Day Parade.

It’s fresh and unexpected, because it reminds us that the Irish are simpletons and Catholics, in addition to being alcoholics.

To ignore the role of humour in our country’s history would be to ignore the very heart of our national soul. These jokes aren’t cruel, or racist—they’re patriotic, in addition to being cruel and racist. That is the history of America, for better or worse. After all:

Q: What would you call what happened to the Injuns when we came to this country?
A: Getting maize-holed.

See?

Well, that’s all for this missive—make sure to come back next week for a ethno-nationalist defense of Helen Keller jokes.

Hello again, and welcome back to the wonderful world of A-Practical-Guide-to-Racism-dot-com.

In the history of racial studies, few questions have spurred more debate than one of the most basic: “how many races are there?” The answer, of course, is nine, as I prove conclusively in my book. But for centuries, scholars have debated the question. Before explaining the reasoning behind my own conclusions, let us first consider some of these competing theories.

Take Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the celebrated French naturalist. After extensive travel and observation, Buffon came to the conclusion that the human race is divided into six varieties—viz., Polack, Tartar, Austral-Asiatic, European, Negro, and American.

But all this proves is that Buffon—wait for it—is a buffoon. Modern science has proven that observation alone cannot justify this kind of conclusion. Buffon is attempting to prove a deductive point using inductive reasoning, and the evidence simply doesn’t support it. I mean, my God, he completely ignores the red-skinned races (Indians and Injuns). I like to think that modern racial theory has advanced beyond this kind of ad hoc Linnaean parceling.

Another self-styled ethnographer was the great Germanic philosopher, Immanuel Kant. He further simplified the racial picture by postulating only four races: White, Black, Copper, and Olive.

Let me first say that I am not at all unsympathetic to this sort of thinking. There is obviously a great deal of insight behind dividing the races by color. Of course, I would add “Yellow” and “Red” to Kant’s picture, for a total of six races. And I would replace “White” with “Normal,” but that doesn’t take anything away from his theory.

Unfortunately, we lose too much when we oversimplify the world’s racial makeup. Kant’s schema might be useful for teaching to schoolchildren, or the poor, but in the interests of science, we demand a more elucidative theory of ethnicity. How, after all, would his four-race hypothesis account for Merpeople, or Jews? Both whites and Merpeople are flesh-colored, and Jews and Arabs both share an olive complexion, but no truly useful racial theory would fail to delineate between them.

Similarly, Jacquinot’s tripartite, Caucasian-Mongol-Negro, view is illuminative but incomplete. No, the only definitive picture of the races is my own, nine-race schema: blacks, whites, Jews, Arabs, Hispanics, Merpeople, Gypsies, Asians, and Indians/Injuns. It is the mark of a good theory, like this one, that it works phenotypically, genotypically, and geographically. Obviously, each of those nine races is aesthetically distinct from the others, and the only two cases where there is a geographic disconnect (Hispanics in both Spain and the Americas, Indians and Injuns) have a very clear tectonic explanation. If there were any fewer races, we would be missing out on important distinctions, but if there were more we would be over-complicating the situation and losing sight of the bigger picture.

Of course, there are always sub-races and minor ethnicities, but these can almost always be grouped within the larger nine races (Chinese, Japanese, Dirty Knees), or dismissed as outliers or archaisms (Fraggles, Doozers).

I hope that this has cleared up this controversy once and for all. You can look for a more nuanced defense in my book, A Practical Guide to Racism, or in my article, “The Nine Races,” in July’s Journal of Aesthetic Ethnography and Phrenology. Now go out there and use what you’ve learned!