In February, President Trump’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of State, Jeremy Carl (author of The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, which is what you write when the worst thing that has ever happened to your people is this book) sat before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was asked to define white culture. He could have said: we are a people who crossed an ocean and forgot what we left behind, then called the forgetting freedom. Instead he said: have you seen what they’re doing with the halftime show?!
White chocolate contains no cocoa solids. It, like whiteness itself, is defined entirely by what has been removed. In Europe, people are Italian or Croatian or Irish. In America, they became white. Or more specifically, not them. Not Black. Not brown. Not Indigenous. Not the people whose land you are standing on, whose music you are about to appropriate, or whose recipes you put in a mason jar and sell at a farmer’s market for eleven dollars.
This would be merely embarrassing if it weren’t also policy. But Jeremy Carl was not just a guy with bad tweets and a book deal. He was the preferred nominee of an administration currently deporting people at record speed, rolling back voting rights protections, and bullying universities out of diversity initiatives with the enthusiasm of a man who has never once been pulled over for driving through the wrong neighborhood. Carl withdrew his nomination in March. The administration expressed disappointment. So, let’s make cookies.
The macadamia nut is native to Australia and arrived in your cookie via colonial land clearing and Hawaiian plantation agriculture. Like white Americans, it was uprooted from its origin, settled somewhere else, and is now completely unbothered by its own history. Make America White Again Cookies are sufficiently colonial, defined by absence, and aggressively confident in their flavor profile. And, they are delicious. Of course they are. Nobody builds an empire on something that doesn’t taste good.
Serves: Americans who describe their cultural identity as “normal,” their neighborhood as “up and coming,” and their politics as “common sense.”
Yield: One batch of cookies and enough generational indifference to never once wonder why the cookies came out this way.
2½ cups all-purpose flour (unbleached, which means it whitened on its own, slowly, over time, which is also the story of the Irish)
1 tsp cornstarch (keeps things from falling apart, like institutional racism)
1 tsp baking soda (for lift; the ingredient equivalent of inherited wealth)
½ tsp salt (for balance, which the Department of Justice is currently redefining)
1 cup butter, softened (European-style, as God intended)
¾ cup packed brown sugar (technically protected since 1965)
½ cup granulated white sugar (would like to speak to the manager about the protected part)
2 large eggs (free-range, which is what you call it when the range was acquired in 1848 from Mexico at gunpoint)
1 tsp vanilla extract (native to Mexico, hand-pollinated in Madagascar by workers earning poverty wages, available at Costco in a two-pack)
1 cup white chocolate chips (contains no cocoa solids; has written a book about this being chocolate’s fault)
1 cup macadamia nuts, roughly chopped (named after a Scottish man who didn’t discover them; add more if you feel this is relevant to your identity)
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Things will get hot. Not hot enough to change anything structural, but hot enough to make one man briefly uncomfortable.
In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, cornstarch, baking soda, and salt. Set aside. You can always find it again. Ask jeremycarl4.
In a large bowl, combine butter and both sugars until light and creamy. Add vanilla extract. The mixture will smell faintly of something you can’t name but feel you’re entitled to.
Gradually blend in the flour mixture until combined. Fold in the white chocolate chips and macadamia nuts. Take a moment to appreciate that you will not get whiter than this without a Senate confirmation hearing.
Cover and refrigerate for at least one hour; just enough time for the dough to firm up and one Republican from Utah to read the footnotes.
Roll dough into heaping tablespoon-sized balls and place on a parchment-lined baking sheet, two inches apart. Under sufficient heat, they will spread. Leave room for the walk-back.
Bake 10–12 minutes, until the edges are golden and the centers look almost underdone. They will firm up, white supremacy was baked in from the beginning.
Cool on the pan for ten minutes. Transfer to a wire rack. Let them cool completely before serving, which is more time than most people spend thinking about any of this.
Serve warm. Pairs well with the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, the dismantling of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the restoration of Confederate monuments on federal land. Make America Great Again. You know what we mean.
Whiteness was always a group project.
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