Re your assertion that "America does have a hierarchy of life, with pretty blondes at the top, black Americans and Native Americans further down and the rest of the world trailing hopelessly":You are a bigot. Your use of the epithets "pretty" (we prefer the term Persons of Regular Features) and "blonde" (an insulting street term for Americans Of Primarily European Genetic Heritage) is a sickening example of oppressive lookism at its worst. Your elitist and racist use of the slur term "pretty blonde" (a well-known code phrase used by crypto-turpocentric bigots to refer to the sterotypical "attractive heterosexual white man/woman") reveals only your own culturally / institutionally inculcated jealousy/rage complex towards those whom you perceive as a threat to the unattractive/mousy/homosexual female power structure that dominates academia in the modern world.
Well, this is one "pretty blonde" who is through riding at the back of your bus, Miss Orr. We Regular-Featured Americans of Primarily European Genetic Heritage are no longer going to sit back and accept the rampant bigotry of the entrenched turpocracy (of which you are _sui generis_) which seeks to delegitimize those whose aesthetic and chromatic characteristics are external of and flagrantly antithetical to the dominant, oppressive, and frankly fascistic purveyors of the gazeist world-categorizing epistimological _Weltanschauung_ that those outside of our Face/Color community would seek to universally immanentize throughout the nöosphere.
In other words: go back to the Isle of Lesbos, Miss Orr. The harpies miss you.
B. Chan Tarrant County, Texas