Meanwhile, the specific nature of white supremacy and its particular histories disappear. There’s no such thing as generic racism, and pretending there is — whether with ginger or “Check your privilege” jokes — reduces complex and traumatic legacies to arbitrary historical accidents. In America, this means first and foremost trivializing the experiences of black people. Even if “ginger” weren’t already an easy anagram for our country’s most infamous anti-black slur, whenever Americans start engaging in intellectual games of bigotry equivalence, black history gets erased first.

Being a redhead in 2014 means constantly engaging with a really dumb metaphor about race. The ginger metaphor doesn’t just do damage to the victims of the upcoming Kick a Ginger Day (“It’s a joke”), it inhibits the ability to discuss, understand and challenge white supremacy. We as a nation are called on to address particular grievances, and sometimes we do it with humor, but repeating lines from the second act of a decade-old “South Park” episode isn’t going to cut it. Having gone to middle school, I know there’s no sentence that makes someone more vulnerable than “I don’t like it when you say that,” but it’s also the smallest struggle against laughing along.