Happy Days is my favorite theme song

Pity white Americans, forced to have a higher standard of living and greater access to education, resources and power.

How terrible it is to walk around your own neighborhood at night and not have police confront you because you don’t look like you belong. How heartbreaking it is to commit criminal acts or violate social norms and not be judged as harshly, if at all, for them. How tragic it is to openly and menacingly carry a gun to a political event and be considered a patriot instead of a thug.

Yes, life sure is rough for us whites in the United States. A struggle every day against the shackles placed on us by our skin color. A burden of unimaginable horrors. A… oh, come on.

Being born a white American is like winning the fucking lottery. I’m thrilled to be a white chick from the United States for the same reason I’m thrilled I have all five senses and full use of my limbs: It doesn’t make me a better person, but it sure makes life a hell of a lot easier.

Being white means the world is yours, something I could intellectually grasp but didn’t truly understand until leaving the United States for Brazil and then Hong Kong.

I’m from a lower middle-class family where, if someone’s name is in the newspaper, it’s undoubtedly in the police blotter section, and I’m the first member to graduate from college. My father dropped out of high school, and my maternal grandfather managed to support a family on only a fourth-grade education. My background isn’t that dissimilar to those of many poorer non-white immigrants, but see, I’m not an immigrant.

Living abroad, I learned that I am an “expat.” On the surface, there’s not much difference between an expat and an immigrant. Both generally leave behind their homeland and families for economic or educational benefits or to escape social or political environments they find oppressive.

Where the difference lies is that an expat is a Westerner, generally white, who is praised for deigning to learn five words of the language of their new country, while an immigrant, generally not white, is criticized for the same.

I first experienced this in Brazil, where I routinely (and with encouragement) violated the terms of my student visa and often preferred to speak in my native tongue than in Portuguese—and everyone thought I was wonderful, especially self-loathing middle-class Brazilians who put a premium on “superior” American culture.

Yet a darker-skinned Bolivian or Peruvian playing the flute in Praça da República, who likely shared the same visa and language difficulties that I did, was spat on. “Look at these foreigners, living here illegally and not learning Portuguese!” You mean like 90% of white American English teachers in the country?

But, hey, we can’t be immigrants, illegal or otherwise, because we’re expats. Rules shouldn’t apply to us. Look at the English-language forums for Asian and Latin American countries where white Americans seek advice on how to get around visa restrictions or how to not be caught violating them. If Fox News found a Spanish-language forum for Mexicans seeking the same advice, they’d get a month’s worth of sensationalist programming out of it.

How many shows on the Travel Channel involve a white guy traveling around poor countries and figuring out how to cross borders illegally? “I’m about to enter Russia without a visa because I can’t be arsed to obtain one. Let’s see what happens!”

What happens is they’re stopped, held and questioned for a few hours before being released and uploading a video they surreptitiously made with their cell phone. Would a non-white, non-Westerner view illegally entering a country and being arrested as just another wacky adventure to share with the world?

When conservatives like Rush Limbaugh “threaten” to leave the United States for countries like Costa Rica or Panama, we laugh. “Oh, you silly right-winger. Don’t you know those places are more socialist and less free?” Sure, that’s true—if you’re a local.

For white Americans, rules rarely apply. That’s why those countries are so appealing. It reminds them of the good ol’ days, when being white meant something. Even if you were poor, at least you weren’t a—well, you know—and the few scraps of power doled out by the elite to the unwashed masses were tipped in your favor.

That imbalance isn’t as pronounced today and whites are more likely to be judged on their merits alone, which angers quite a few people who think they should be able to skate by on race. That’s the heart of the Tea Party movement: “How dare you hold us to the same standards as those people.” Who’s really playing the race card?

In Asia, being white is considered a valuable job skill. A black American woman with a PhD in linguistics would have less success finding a job teaching her native language than a blonde, blue-eyed college dropout who thinks “conversate” is a real word. There’s weight behind the words of whites.

When a mainland client of my husband’s employer has an engineering or programming issue, the company doesn’t send an engineer or programmer because they’re Chinese. They send my husband, who has no ability to fix the problem, so he can sit at the client site and be white, while the Chinese employees address the issue behind the scenes.

Because sending a white person shows you’re taking it very seriously. They even printed fake business cards for him that list US contact information. Because sending a white person from far overseas means you’re taking it super cereal.

And Asia is a sexual playground for white guys who can’t get laid in the US because us uppity bitches dare to have standards and options.

Last year, I went with my husband to his company’s annual conference at a beach resort in Thailand. One night, we went to a bar where bikini-clad Thai women danced on stage and you could spank them with elongated inflatable tubes. Pure class. My husband’s morbidly obese, old-as-Yoda, white co-worker smirked at one of the women—a girl, really—and said, “I’ll see you later, honey.”

The look of disgust on her face is one I’ll never forget. Because she knew she would have to see him later. And that was a turn-on to him. Not just that she was young, but that he had absolute control and it was his whiteness—a slowly dying advantage back home--that gave him that control.

If you’re a white American, there’s an assumption in many parts of the world that it means you’re intelligent, educated, powerful and/or wealthy—and thus will add something to the community or have something worth taking advantage of, unlike those shiftless, swarthy immigrants.

A Brazilian friend is a manager with the São Paulo office of a large US technology firm, and he and his Brazilian co-workers deal with Americans on a regular basis. They were shocked to discover that Americans are just as ignorant as the countrymen they so frequently derided. Absolutely shocked. Like it never occurred to them it was within the realm of possibility to be simultaneously white, American and barely evolved from Neanderthals.

But thanks to the inanity of the Tea Party movement and the global attention it’s receiving, the word is finally getting out: White people can be dumb, poor motherfuckers just like everyone else, and the ones most invested in maintaining their privilege are the same ones doing their best to destroy it.