Good afternoon,

If you are interested in applying for an assistant editor position with **** * *******, please send an email to YOUR MOTHER (editor@eatshit.edu) expressing your interest and answering these two questions:

1Why are you the right person for this job?

2What are your qualifications?

We realize that you are probably not trained as an editor so that does not need to be how you are qualified. Let us know about your good qualities. Please send the email by Friday, April 26th.

Thanks,

*Low Growl*

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Dear Mom,

• Why am I the right person for this job?
  • Because I invented all of this. There’s no one else.
• What are my qualifications?
  • I’ll answer this question with a list of my strengths and weaknesses.
  • Strengths
    1. I am saving myself for divorce.
    2. I’ve been told that I have a ‘way with words’ (whatever in the world that means).
    3. I have very little conscience or empathy, and even less of a moral compass. (These qualities aren’t mentioned explicitly in the list of responsibilities for the position, but reading between the lines I felt like it was strongly implied that they are desirable.)
    4. I am out here tryna make a difference.
  • Weaknesses
    1. If I get the position, I will absolutely spend the whole year (and beyond, probably) really aggressively, mercilessly rubbing it in the faces of those who didn’t get it.
    2. In the past year and a half, I’ve accidentally wandered into the women’s restroom, when I was intending to go into the men’s restroom, three separate times. It has been an accident each time—I’ve sincerely panicked and rushed out as soon as I realize what’s happened, hoping no one is there to notice my mistake—but three times in eighteen months feels like a lot. I’m starting to wonder if I’m doing it on purpose. And if I am, that can’t be good.
    3. Honestly, I’m pretty terrible at reading between the lines. It often causes problems.
    4. Barbara Applebaum defines white culpable ignorance as “a white refusal to know what one ought to know because to know would implicate one in the perpetuation of systematic injustice.” Instead, white people who take part in culpable ignorance bolster the system of racism by “agreeing to misinterpret the world.” The manifestation of privilege in the construction of white ignorance is indicative of the power that heightened social position wields. Not only can white people choose not to see, hear, or acknowledge something that stares them in the face, they can also not know and believe that they do have a realistic perception of the world surrounding them. White people are allowed to continue believing their perspectives are accurate because white ignorance is maintained collectively through the epistemology of ignorance. An epistemology of ignorance is a “systematically supported, socially induced pattern of (mis)understanding the world that is connected to and works to sustain systematic oppression and privilege. In other words, there is a “culturally sanctioned discourse of evasion that protects the interests of the privileged and their moral composure.” (Roberson, “An Act of Bearing W(h)it(e)ness: Exploring the Past, Present, and Future Struggle to Desegregate Public Schools in Central Arkansas”)
  • Strength/Weakness (not sure about this one)
    1. There is an impossibly dark, bottomless emptiness at the center of me. I am in constant terror of disappearing into it, and this frenzy drives my every action. I know, in my mind, that I will never escape it. But I also know, in my heart, that I will never surrender to it.

Thank you for deciding to accept the inevitable and giving me this position.

Love ya lots,

ya boy ****