“Who here is white?” asked Miss Sumpter, the 3rd-grade social studies teacher at Millbrooks Elementary School in Champaign, Ill., to her students while conducting a mock census.
Each hand in the all-white classroom limped up, confirming their whiteness, though most of the students were just slightly confused by Miss Sumpter’s question. Well, each hand except for one. When little Meg Kelly heard this question, her heart raced, the hair on her arms stood at attention, her nostrils flared, her tiny little blonde pigtails morphed into horns. She then lept from her chair and onto her desk, where she screamed, “ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! I AM WHITE! I AM WHITE! I AM WHITE!”
The rest of the classroom, by now used to Meg’s blood-curdling thirst for opportunities for her whiteness to be acknowledged, put their hands back down and continued doing whatever they had been doing before the question. The now dead-eyed Miss Sumpter simply said, “Thank you, Megyn,” and continued daydreaming about Pete Maravich.
Little Meg Kelly didn’t have much interest in school. Math bored her. Science annoyed her. English composition gave her acid reflux. What made her race to the school bus each morning—what made her so overcome with glee that her parents would crush Ambien into her breakfast cereal—is that each new day provided a new opportunity to remind her classmates, her friends, her teachers, as well as the bus drivers, and the school nurse, and the assistant principal - and sometimes even the squirrels in the park during recess - that she was, is, and will always be, white.
“I’m Megyn Kelly, and I’m white!” she said in homeroom on the first day, when Mr. Elkstein asked the students to state their names.
“Can I have some more celery? Also I’m white!” she said to the lunch ladies yesterday, who then told her that the celery was dead.
When playing “Tag” after school, instead of saying, “You’re it,” she’d say, “I’m white!” When bored in class—which was often, because she was dumb—she’d take a bottle of whiteout and write “white” repeatedly on her forearms. It gave her a bad allergic reaction once. Her parents sighed and said “Maybe we should just, you know, let her die” before breaking down and giving her Benadryl.
Still, she’d never had a day like mock census day, where instead of declaring and stating and writing and volunteering and reminding and acknowledging and whispering and screaming that she’s white, someone actually asked her. “Finally, they see me!” Little Meg thought as she lept from her seat. “Finally they know me! Finally, they understand!”
After she finished screaming, she sat back down. Then she liquified into a clear vat of White Out. And she was so happy.