I dunno… she told her brother “not to blow her cover”, at one point. Clearly, she realized that this was necessarily the right thing to do. But it could indeed be a mental health issue. It could also be a case of a sense of entitlement on her part.
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There is this guy
http://hollywoodlife.com/2015/06/12/charlamagne-tha-god-transracial-debate-rachel-dolezal-caitlyn-jenner-transgender/
I keep wondering if it is a Common People kind of situation though.
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But why entitlement? Is there evidence for this idea? Isn’t reducing every interaction regarding race in the United States to privilege, entitlement, and oppression a little absurd?
(watch, others are going to accuse me of denying there is a power imbalance 
. It is the, “why do you hate america?” of sociology and race relations studies.)
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Why do you hate America?
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our abysmal lack of authentic meat pies!!
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I’d say it’s entitlement because she’s made it about her, it seems to me. I could be wrong about that, but everything she’s said so far seems to indicate to me that it’s about her subjective experience that she has the right to call herself black, no matter her actually background and experiences in America.
If you say you are not ignoring power imbalances, I’ll believe you, actually.
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I hadn’t heard that from that guy…
But yeah… I can see this being a “common people” situation, but with race instead of class, of course. Very American.
But couldn’t one argue that instead of entitlement, it is racial assimilation? Done in an unethical way (it’s all about ethics in… i can’t even keep a straight face)?
I think that it’s entitlement to think she can assimilate in this particular way. I think, yes, whites can assimilate into the black community in a variety of ways, but she’s doing it in such an unethical way, I think it smacks of entitlement… She feels she belongs there because she feels she’s black. So maybe this gets back to @chgoliz’s point about mental illness?
Race relations? 
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one more, then back to cooking topics for me.
even with a negative power imbalance, is racial assimilation evidence on it’s face of entitlement?
quick, to Excel–we need charts and graphs and Powerpoints!
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No, I think what SHE did is, though. That’s how it comes off to me. I could be wrong, though, but that’s what I get out of it.
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Oh. Well yeah then, ignorance is not the excuse here.
Probably both. Almost certainly both!
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I see a number of differentials here.
She was working for a community.
She identified with that community because of her familial connections and education.
She identified herself to that community as being intrinsically part of it.
In so doing she had to hide from that same community, facts which may have caused her to be extricated from it by that very community.
Her personal experience aside, can anyone make the claim to belong to a particular community when the community itself would question the authenticity of such a claim?
I suspect that a dark-skinned african-american could not claim to be part of a self-policing ‘white community’, even though I’ve read on this very website of a light skinned african-american journalist infiltrating racist communities in the deep south in order to report on racist lynchings.
Now, both this crazy lady and the journalist are lying to people in order to do good work so it should be apparent that its who is being lied to that is the important factor in the equation.
And what if another crazy person does a similar thing in infiltrating the black community but with the intention of causing destruction? Shall we also argue that they, from a position of privilege, may feel trans-racial?
I’m not comfortable with the concept of punching up and down being a clear demarcation of intentionality insofar as it relates to right behaviour but this would seem to be a fairly clear example of the matter.
Edit: some language to make my point clearer. Do rational white people think of themselves as belonging to a ‘white community’? Usually only racists do this. The black community can mean so many different things to so many different people and as such isn’t the same kind of community - it isn’t based, for the most part, on self-policing exclusion. I can understand a permeable membrane existing that functions in one direction. A twin may be borne who’s sibling would not automatically acquire the same unquestioned acceptance based on skin colour or other characteristics. But this isn’t such a case where a chance of genetics is all but concealed by the outward appearance of one’s vehicle.
So in what phase space does this membrane exist? Surely it is cultural. And if it is, then why lie, why feel the need to obscure your lie in your representation of yourself?
The recent story of the Hawaiian lady who described having to repeatedly explain her heritage to her community so as not to appear to be performing this very same kind of obfuscation highlights the insensitivity with which Rachel was behaving.
Surely with the work she was doing, with her connection to the community, she would have been accepted by it regardless of her heritage. If she had been open about herself. No one likes being misled, no one appreciates the lie.
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You’ve got to go to Canadian America for those.
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There are some differences in how race and gender work, but there are also similarities. They are both more constructed identities, much more than about their respective biologies. This is why I have put forth the (apparently unpopular) suggestion of never assuming what race or sex people are, and asking instead. There is no reason it can’t work, just as when we ask a person about their gender. Isn’t it unfounded entitlement to tell somebody else who they are?
But, on the flip side, this means that we’d need to second-guess what her subjective experience of race has been. If we say that she cannot honestly experience life as another, how can we claim to experience hers?
I grew up as a McLuhanesque “global villager” from a very young age, knowing intuitively that I partly create my culture by participation, and that I can draw upon the entirety of human history and cultures to do this. I never felt that what people near me did 50 years before I was born was any more authentically “mine” than what people there did 1000 years ago, or across the globe. I socialized nonlocally. So I have always been sensitive to people telling me that something is supposedly not my culture, but they then propose replacing it with something I have no experience of. Sometimes communication can have a more immediate effect upon one’s development than static institutions do.
What I consider “appropriation” has more to do with how one interacts with formal social structures than any of the other particulars. Does she actually live African culture? I would say that even many black people are merely appropriating black culture than living it, if they prefer to use European names, languages, clothes, non-African religions, etc. This goes for any ethnic group which allows themselves to be assimilated. How far can they go while still claiming to live their authentic cultural heritage? For instance, my parents did not identify as biracial, but I do. It is a biologically accurate description of who I am, but not culturally accurate.
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I don’t understand where this ‘using her whiteness’ thing comes in. You presume (and the Motherjones article infers but doesn’t provide supporting evidence) that she raised the suit as a white woman protesting ‘black privilege’ in terms of education support. Her current position on blackness and black culture doesn’t support that. I suggest (and may be quite wrong) that the article is too sparse to support that notion, and it is equally possible that she may was suing because she felt that she was being mis-classified in a discriminatory manner - that she was black, identified as black, and felt that the university classifying her as white was false.
I totally agree with that point, although it risks echoing the German Anarchist slogan of “An end to all nations, but Israel last”. I think that there are all sorts of approaches to the issue both possible and practiced which can end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. However in a situation where really what we are talking about is the defining of people who are ‘other and inferior’ what set of concepts should we tear down except the ones built around otherness, inferiority, not belonging? And how is that accomplished without expecting black people to demolish their self-identification?
I honestly can’t say I understand her position. I haven’t heard anything like enough of her side of the story. It could be a cynical ploy to gain a political position that would otherwise be filled by a black person - it might even be the act of someone who belives that ‘reverse racism’ is so powerful that she could only get a fair shake by impersonating a black woman, although I doubt it!. It could be as you say, an overt if misguided rejection of malign whiteness. It could be a kind of orientalism, a fascination with the ‘other’ to the point where she wanted to become or absorb its ‘otherness’. But it could also be that she identifies with a part of her ancestry that is denied by her family.
As for ‘appropriating an experience’ or ‘amplifying voices’ - I don’t think these are meaningful phrases. If she is appropriating anything it is an appearance, a set of symbols which are taken to mean a set of things about a person (what they mean varying depending upon who is interpreting).
I would ask whether any of the criticisms levelled in terms of her not experiencing the totality of black oppression (either in terms of growing up in a state of oppression, or being able to set aside black identity at will and thus escape oppression) could not be equally levelled at a person of black origin who was able to pass in white society - say, Walter Francis White, who had 5 black great-great-great grandparents, but was chief executive of the NAACP? Surely his ability to pass in white society (which he used regularly) meant that he couldn’t share the black experience fully?
All of the tweets I’ve read about trans-ethnicity sound like a piss-take to me, but maybe I’m wrong.
Hey, are furries trans-sylvanian?
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I got all excited recently when Pie Face announced they were coming to America. But they closed their NYC stores after barely a year and canceled expansion plans 
She says that she identifies as black. I don’t see a lot of evidence that she’s doing this for the perceived benefits of this label. It doesn’t seem to be an extension of being an ally, it’s just that she sees herself as black (and also supports black causes).
I’d say this is not necessarily about the cultural effect. Is she deceiving people or performing, or is this how she sees her identity?
Are male>female transsexuals doing the same thing, by identifying with a marginalised group from a position of power? Is experiencing racial struggle a necessary part of the black experience?
Not to push the parallels with transsexualism, but these are all objections that are made against people who don’t identify with their ‘true nature’. What makes them valid now if she is actually being honest? Jumping to mental illness opens a huge can of worms if we’re all entitled to tell people what their real identity is. Can transsexuals be women if they don’t ‘pass’?
I was born and grew up in Ireland, while my older brother spent his first three months in England before my parents moved. He has always strongly identified as English, while my younger brothers and I always identified as Irish. When we needed passports, he chose British and we chose Irish. It didn’t matter that my parents were British or that he had basically spent his whole life in Ireland - that’s how we saw ourselves and presented ourselves to others. When my family moved back to the UK, it was not ‘home’ for me. Some English people said I would never be one of them. Then my accent softened and Irish people started calling me a ‘plastic Irishman’. None of my perceived identity had anything to do with who had explicitly invited me to share in their identity - I just identified with the culture that I felt closest to, and gradually came to resent certain people from both sides who felt that they could tell which one I really was. At the end of the day, I’m an individual and neither label fits well any more, especially since I haven’t been based in either country for years. What I objected to then and here is this idea that there is a clear binary reality to identity and ‘misidentifying’ is strategic - my brother is claiming to be British because it’s culturally dominant. I’m claiming to be Irish because it’s cool. Rachel Dolezal claims to be black in order to get cheap recognition. If she’s not just identifying as black or white as it suits her, I’d give her the benefit of the doubt.
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