As I look around, I wonder if, for bleached blonds who are white, the added blondness is whitening their whiteness, erasing their ethnicity? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, white Anglo-Saxons in the United States persecuted Italians and the Irish, ostensibly for their religion, before they could claim whiteness. Their passports associated them with blackness, and for some, perhaps, their dark hair confirmed their nonwhite status. I suppose if all I had to do was bleach my hair blond to stop white supremacists from wanting to burn crosses in my yard, I might consider blondness
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