(Trigger warning: This piece uses “font” and “typeface” interchangeably.)

CNN tweeted out a question the other day: “Can a font be racist?” The only proper answer would be “Yes, and I am sorry for using it. I will do better. And by the way, what font was it?”

A stereotypical “Asian” font, made of triangular brushstrokes. As the article put it: “For years, the West has relied on so-called ‘chop suey’ fonts to communicate ‘Asianness’ in food packaging, posters and ad campaigns. But such fonts perpetuate problematic stereotypes.”

What doesn’t? A slab of marble sitting on a vast desert plain can be problematic, if you have enough imagination. I just wrote that without thinking how, exactly, but let’s see if it’s possible. Thinking hard . . . Okay, got it.

Marble was used to create the great statues of Greece, right? Hewed with exploited labor, no doubt, then dragged into town to promote unrealistic body standards.

“Well,” a scholar could say, “it’s possible that the ancient Greeks had a body-positivity movement and celebrated all body types, but marble was expensive, so you’re going to want to carve slender people from smaller blocks.”

Perhaps, but it gets worse. The statues were originally painted in dazzling hues that wore away over time, leaving only the alabaster surface. So? According to a 2018 New Yorker article, Europeans used the unpainted statues to establish whiteness as the standard for beauty. Art-critique.com, 2019: “Whiteness, Sculpture, Historical Inaccuracy, and Colonialism.” Forbes, 2017: “White­washing Ancient Statues: Whiteness, Racism and Color in the Ancient World.” And so on.

To recap: Marble is highly troublesome; white marble made Europeans think they were the apogee of human­kind; the single slab in a desert is a stark symbolic manifestation of colonialism, which displaced indigenous people with an imported culture.

Or, it just fell off a truck. Either way, it’s problematic. Anything can be problematic. Even fonts. Especially fonts. It might be a good sign that we’re canceling fonts; it suggests that the rich veins of outrage have been tapped and the petty Jacobins looking for clout are reduced to panning for lead in thin, shallow streams. Or, it means their hold on the culture is gathering power and will soon lead to lists of permitted typefaces. Speaking of which: You know who else banned a typeface?

That’s right! Hitler!

For decades, the Nazis had used a German Blackletter–type font called “Fractur.” You can see it in your mind’s eye: something busy, spiky, and “Gothic,” pouring out of Bismarck’s maw in a cartoon. But as 1941 dawned, party chief Martin Bormann issued a decree that banned Fractur in official documents and communiqués, replacing it with Antiqua. You can guess Bormann’s reason: Far from being a hearty good Aryan font, Blackletter was created by — gasp — the Jews. They’d taken over newspapers and printing presses when moveable type was invented and replaced decent German letters with their own. What you might call “the ink libel.”

It was nonsense, but do you want to be the guy who goes to Bormann and says, “Actually, the Jews were excluded from the printing guilds”? It’s possible someone told him the story to see if he’d waste a week and upend the lives of everyone in publishing just because he feared getting called on the carpet by the Boss for setting a new edition of Mein Kampf in literal Yiddish, as the Internet kids would say.

Some fonts are problematic for good reason: The early days of the Internet abounded with Gill Sans, a venerable font included in some early website-development programs. Its creator, Eric Gill, was regarded as a fellow of great aesthetic abilities, but that probably meant nothing to his children, his sisters, and his dog, all of whom he sexually abused. It’s rarely used today. People suspect that you don’t know, or worse, that you do.

When I saw the chop-suey font in the CNN story I was reminded of a powdered-drink product from my youth: Funny Face. It was Pillsbury’s attempt to muscle in on the Kool-Aid territory. Various flavors were represented by fruit wearing goofy expressions; two examples were offensive even in the ’60s, and canceled. One was “Injun Orange.” Cross-eyed fellow wearing a feather. The other was “Chinese Cherry.” Standard racist image: slant eyes, prominent teeth. The sort of “funny” cultural cliché you passively absorbed if you were a white kid in North Dakota.

There was also “Goofy Grape,” who wore a hat we associated with Napoleon. It was known to all that crazy people stuck their hand in their shirt and thought they were the emperor. So they managed to denigrate mental illness as well. If this was what they put on kids’ drink-mix packets, you get a sense of how these casual stereotypes saturated the culture.

Did Chinese Cherry make me think anything bad about Asians? The only Asians I knew were Sulu on Star Trek and Kam Fong on Hawaii Five-O, two impressive people. The use of Gothic fonts did not make me curious about ethno-fascist totalitarians; the pure, modern perfection of Gill Sans did not make me cast a lascivious look at my dog. We are formed by our culture, yes, but at some point you have to take responsibility for your beliefs and the delusions you nurture to sustain your suspicions.

Chop suey is a lousy typeface and I’d never use it in a project. But the people who’d ban fonts will quickly come up with a list of typefaces you could use, followed by a list of fonts you should use, followed by a list of fonts you must use. The Times New Roman are a-changin’, as the poet said.