As you know, everything is racist today. When you don’t have an argument, just call someone a racist. It’s the wild card in any debate.

Over time, playing the race card diminishes actual racial bigotry.

The latest racial kerfuffle is over a brown corn pop on a cereal box.

Here’s the image:

Do you see the corn pop with the hat and wearing headphones with a floor cleaning machine in his hands? That’s what’s racist.

A writer for Marvel Comics took to Twitter on Wednesday to ask why a Corn Pops scene included a brown anthropomorphic kernel performing janitorial duties among a group of others having fun. The company responded within hours with a promise to rectify the situation.

“Hey @KelloggsUS why is literally the only brown corn pop on the whole cereal box the janitor?” said Saladin Ahmed, who writes “Black Bolt” for Marvel. “This is teaching kids racism.” Ahmed then added, “Yes it’s a tiny thing, but when you see your kid staring at this over breakfast and realize millions of other kids are doing the same…” (Washington Times)

Instead of being proud of the fact that the brown Corn Pop is working while all the other Corn Pops are “having fun,” Saladin Ahmed decides that a working brown Corn Pop is racially insensitive and tinged with racism.

I cleaned floors with the same type of machine. I also worked as a dishwasher, actually, a washer of pots and pans, pumped gas, stocked shelves at Kroger and Pantry Pride, and stacked cordwood, made concrete slabs by hand, cut glass, threaded pipe at a hardware store.

I can guarantee you that a father in the 1950s and 1960s who saw the above image would have said something like this to his children:

Do you see that brown Corn Pop with the hat and working with that heavy piece of equipment? That’s who I want you to imitate, not those lazy Corn Pops wasting their time playing.

Do you see what he’s wearing over his ears? Headphones. Where do you think he got those headphones and the device to play music? That’s right. He was able to buy them because he works while his friends are playing.

He may be listening to lectures because he’s going to school at night. If you want to get ahead in the world, you need to be working while others are playing. The time will come when hard work will pay off.

Instead of crying “racism,” Ahmed should have praised Kellogg’s for showing a “person of color” hard at work.