Everything Is Racist

A story popped up in my X feed a few days ago, and I glossed right over it. 

After all, it was about a fashion trend, and I don't care about fashion trends. It was about nail polish, and I definitely don't care about nail polish. 

Thank God it wasn't about eyebrow plucking. My wife always asks me what I think when she gets hers done, and I just nod and say they're beautiful, because women apparently care about their eyebrow shape. 

I barely even wondered why X fed me that story, and did so more than once. Apparently, I was supposed to care, according to the algorithm, and it turned out it was right. 

The story wasn't about fashion at all. It was about how bare fingernails are now considered racist. Because everything is now considered racist. 

How the bare nails trend became a class issue https://t.co/2ztyWvUcrX

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) September 26, 2026

I'm not kidding. The BBC actually ran a story about how women who don't paint their nails are making a racial statement, because nail painting is somehow tied to social injustice or something. Being a man, it all goes over my head. 

In recent months, Paloma Buddemeier has watched a stream of people walk into her nail salon with the goal of looking as if they'd never been there at all.

"It's crazy," the owner of Wumman Spa in London says.

These customers still get their nails filed, buffed, and trimmed. "You still do the cuticle, you do the soaking and hydrate everything," says Buddemeier, "but you just put no polish on."

Driving this, she says, is a viral craze for bare-looking nails.

In recent months, artsy shots of glossy naked nails have been flooding social media and taking over fashion runways and red carpets, which some are viewing as the latest symbol of "quiet luxury".

But critics argue the bare nails trend actually says something about class, the hamster wheel of beauty standards, and who gets to define what is considered tasteful.

Nail art's historical and creative roots are linked back to black, Latino, and Asian communities and the suggestion that bare nails are now a sign of high status could stigmatise bold manicures, they say.

"That trend really promotes blankness and this kind of sameness and erasure of culture and identity that is so important to black and brown communities," beauty journalist Kristina Rodulfo tells the BBC.

So...if I understand the way that this sort of thing works, women who get their nails painted are appropriating black culture, but women who don't get their nails painted are spitting in the eye of black culture and making a statement that they are better than black women. 

You could have written that story either way, and since the trend is for bare-looking nails, it's bare nails that are racist. When the trend reverses, as they always do, that will be racist too. Because cultural appropriation is racist. 

The BBC faced so much ridicule over the story that they actually took it down, although the tweet to the link is still up, probably due to social media policies (or laziness). 

The upshot is clear: you cannot win because you are white. White people are always racist, just as black people are never racist.

It's a neat trick, if you can pull it off. In our Manichean world, being racist is the worst thing you can be, and being a victim of racism is the get-out-of-responsibility card for almost any sin. 

Editor's Note: Do you enjoy HotAir's conservative reporting exposing the radical left and woke media? Support our work so we can keep bringing you the truth.

Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.