Disclaimer: The Ivory Belltower is purely satirical. Don’t take it too seriously.
“Let’s talk about the weather,” enthusiastic Tumblr user and business major Snow Blanca said as an introduction to her lecture series relating weather patterns to systematic racism.
Blanca, who is technically white but identifies as 1/12 Cherokee and 1/4 ethnically ambiguous, began her informal series in response to the weekend’s “lily-white discriminatory” snow storm. And to what does Blanca take the most offense?
“Just look at the coverage,” she enunciates, pounding her fist on the unassuming dining hall table that surely wasn’t built to take such abuse, “White, white, white. White reporters talking about white storm clouds spewing out more white stuff, falling on white students and white cars. White workers rushing to their white stores at white o’clock in the evening to pick up white bread and white milk to prepare for the white blankets of white snow and white ice. It’s disgusting.”
The lecture series, which Blanca insists will take off as soon as minority students recognize the attention that needs to be brought to the “blatant, almost Stalin-esque” discrimination, is called “Whether the Weather Weathers.” Her first lecture on the topic titled, “Snowpocalypse or Smallpoxalypse? Can you tell the difference?” attracted an unanticipated crowd of eight.
“You should have seen it,” Blanca boasts after taking a hardy swig of her brandy-infused opium green tea. “People of every color were sitting together with one another. It was as though race had disappeared. Not that I see it anyway. But that’s the power of bringing people together under one roof. Or should I say, one storm cloud.” She smiles coyly before tucking one stray blonde lock behind her tastefully pierced ear.
Blanca describes her talks as being almost “TED Talk-y,” structured as brief forays into identity and respectability politics that branch into a broad plethora of hot topics, which include the gender of hurricane names, the roads that get iced over versus those that do not, the increased likelihood of storms attacking less developed economic regions and something called cumulosexuality.
Terry Bradford, club lacrosse team extraordinaire and one of the attendees at Blanca’s first lecture, as well as her first step toward an insufferable career, says of the event, “I’ve never felt more touched by an event in my life. Like, in a negative way. I think it’s almost as hard, if not harder, to change the color of storm than it is to change the color of your skin. I mean, what, should white storms be shamed for how they happened to condense, because their water happened to be purer and good-er — better — than the other dirtier storms that probably propagated over lower income regions? I know it isn’t PC or whatever to bring up reverse discrimination, but it is a thing. Wait, that came out wrong. Can I say something else, or could you scratch that out, or …?”
Blanca’s solution to our “all-white storm problem” is simple and radical: targeted, concentrated pollution. “The only reasonable thing to do,” she says, “is to properly bring representation to the skies.”
Blanca plans to coordinate with the NC State’s environmental science department to draw up some possible cloud-darkening experiments. Well, as soon as they return her calls. She’s left several voicemails, she assures. “I have, I’ve left several,” she says. “Several.”
