My entire family are closet white supremacists

What you lookin' at boy?

Last night at my grandmother’s 90th birthday party, an innocent game of Celebrity Head revealed most of my extended family to be closet white supremacists.

Celebrity Head is the game where everyone has the name of a famous person attached to their forehead so they can’t see it. They have to ask yes/no questions to work out who they are.

It all started when Roger Federer asked if he was white. His European tan caused minor hesitation before a resounding ‘yes’ swept the room. Then it caught on, and all my relatives over the age of 50 started asking if they were white. JFK, Neil Armstrong, Peter Jackson, all wanting to make sure they weren’t black.

The funniest moment of the evening was when my aunty, having established that she was indeed white, promptly forgot and asked if she was Martin Luther King. I nearly ruptured my spleen.

Also, when playing Celebrity Head, never ask ‘am I Jewish’. This does little to narrow down the field of celebs, as my cousin’s husband soon found out. As Albert Einstein, a German Jew, he immediately became fixated on the idea that he must either be Jesus Christ, Barbara Streisand or Woody Allen.

Another word of advice, Celebrity Head is a challenge for the elderly. My grandmother (Superman), having established that she was a fictional male character, then went on to vigorously pursue a line of questioning to establish whether she was a “professional sports-lady”.

My cousin, as ex-NZ prime minister Helen Clark, preternaturally asked ‘am I attractive’. We had to be honest and tell her ‘no, you are hideous’. I was sure the jig was up and she would win next turn, but she didn’t make the connection.

Seriously, how many female celebrities do you know of who are really really ugly? That’s right, just two. Helen Clark and Camilla Parker Bowles. It should have been easy.

My brother painfully established that he was a beautiful dead female historical figure from Egypt, involved in politics but not in the usual sense. He only got it when I gave him the clue that it rhymed with ‘eopatra’.

My favourite question, from JFK: ‘was I alive in the 1980s’. All lines of enquiry should begin with this question, and not just in Celebrity Head.

At the end of the game, when all the losers got to look at who they were, my father, Roger Federer, declared emphatically that the whole time he’d sensed he was a famous golfer.