Some pranksters have created a website to advertise the Terrorist I.D. Kit, a lunchbox-looking thing full of jokey items that allegedly will help you identify and thwart terrorists. Among other things, you get a pair of glasses that will superimpose an Osama-bin-Laden-looking beard and turban on the faces of people you look at, and poisoned hummus for dispatching the terrorist once you identify him. I find the whole thing pretty funny. (Note for the seriously impaired: this is not an actual product.)

Another of the items in the box, though, is a ‘Skin Color Identification Chart’, which looks like this:

The description of the chart says, in part, “Experts agree that skin color is one of the quickest and most accurate tests in picking out a potential terrorist.”

Ahh, wonderful. No experts that I’ve heard of say anything of the sort, actually. Let’s just reduce it all to racism, and at that racism of the blandest variety. What had struck me, up until this, as a clever joke poking fun at Homeland Security B.S. turns out to be, at least in part, another random race-baiting attempt.

People who say that the United States is racist have generally had no experience of the world outside the United States.