A few months have passed since I read a certain comic strip. By chance, I was forced to re-examine it. The comic artist said that blacks have become the fourth most hated people in the country since September 11th, down from number one prior to the attacks. It said that now the "A-rabs" head the list, followed closely by the South-Asians, who look similar to them, and since the French have been up to their usual antics, they now comfortably occupy the third place. I thought it was interesting, and never gave it a second thought until recently, when I was "suspect" for taking photographs of an unusually formed snowdrift with extraordinary aesthetic qualities. It would not have bothered me, but the fact is that this has happened to me before, also for taking photographs. While the snow was drifting, and while the iridescence was brighter than I could bear even in the bleak afternoon sun, apparently there was a spy.

Wait -- I must pay careful attention to diction. I wasn't the spy for the "A-rabs;" there was no spy for the "A-rabs," but there was a spy for the paranoid status-quo in the country and the Code-Browners (I mean, at least they should call it what it really is), who all seemed to have lost their penises, or rather have become overly conscious of them in recent months. This has only heightened their insecurity at the sight of someone who isn't of the "fairer race."

A student, apparently of this same (white) race, noted that I was taking photographs of this snowdrift outside Rosenthal, and called the police. I found out the next day that perhaps diversity is a bad thing and we should all be uniform, in parade, without the faintest modification of very much anything. Ah, the irony of being born this "exotic" person for the color of my skin, yet being hated for the same -- the second-class citizen dilemma. Perhaps we should all be genetically altered in the same way as the villain in the recent James Bond flick. We should be born identical, mundane and bizarre, so much so that we should be like the Campbell's soup cans that Warhol popularized.

So, why judge me based on some inborn uncontrollable characteristic? What bearing does my color have on my actions? Surely, no white person was targeted in the same way when Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building or when Ted Kaczynski was strutting his stuff.

Now, I am free to walk in fear of myself for the second time, just as a black person walking on the street is free to be conscious of his race. Let me be my own judge, and you can be yours. If you are to judge me, at least judge my action for what it is -- a deep appreciation for a lapse in the monotony of my day, a lapse so slight that no one else noticed its idiosyncratic appeal, a lapse that I was fortunate enough to discover.

Crimes against humanity are currently being committed. Is internment the next step for me?

-- Kedar Kulkarni '06 is a Justice staff photographer.