How about Karim Abdul-Jabbar?
This is making me wonder if Rachel Dolezal started claiming she was a person of colour out of fear of rejection by the community. This would be similar to a pre-transition transperson, fearing the social consequences of being true to themselves.
It might just be my biases, but I feel a bit happier with that than with the suggestions of transracial going round social media, which feels belittling both to transpeople and people of colour. Itās not good, but if I am correct I can at least start to understand why she did it.
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I have no idea. What I do know is that its a complex situation with a lot of moving parts, a lot of missing information, and a lot of mis-information. But people are pretty willing to throw her under the crazy bus based on the one or two articles they read, minus a few paragraphs they donāt agree with.
Them, I donāt trust one bit.
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And the complexity means we can come to different conclusions based on the information we have, right?
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An important thing I keep seeing people not aware of:
Please be aware that ātrans racialā is an actual existing concept, used to describe adoptees being adopted by parents of a different race. They use it to talk about a lot of their challenges and unique experiences, and there are a lot of important discussions to have about trans-racial adoption that get ignored (such as the large amount of abuse, the inability for parents to prepare children for society).
The use of trans-racial to describe Dolezal was started by a group of bigots who make it their goal to harass others and cause as much grief as possible online.
Letās not take away, dismiss, or change an important word or concept because a bunch of assholes want us to use it in a certain way.
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Or because of a scandal such as this.
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You make some good points, but one that Iād like to address in particular is regarding the relationship between Walter Whiteās ethnicity and that of Dolezal and her parents:
Agreed; I know a little about him, which is why I brought him up. Iām not sure that the moral goodness that passing is put to really addresses my point though; a black person that is able to set aside their blackness and avoid oppression doesnāt share the experience fully, of a black person who is unable to pass. And in any case, Rachel Dolezal has been achieving good in her NAACP role too.
Given that we are supposed to have left such crude notions of race behind, how do we define āBlackā and āWhiteā now? Rachelās parents claim to be white on a mixed āCzech, Swedish, German and some Native Americanā ancestry. Surely someone can see the irony in denying someone elseās supposedly contrafactual racial identity claims and then demonstrating that racial identity is both subjective and chosen in the same sentence. And that assumes that they are telling the truth and not using Native Americans as a convenient smokescreen (no pun intended) for an element of their ancestry that they are less comfortable with - which is not uncommon.
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Yes and no. There are specific genetic issues that do have āracialā boundaries. If that will still be the case in 500 years when the planetary population is even more mixed than it is today, remains to be seen.
If I had a dollar for every person who comes into a genealogy discussion claiming to have a Cherokee great-grandmother, I could buy everyone here a night of drinks (and I know how some of you drink!).
The nature of European migration west into the interior of the U.S. is such that the combo of āCzech, Swedish, German and some Native Americanā doesnāt ring true. It sounds like yet another āweāre part Cherokeeā that has no basis in reality.
What people like this donāt realize is how quickly the native population was killed off by disease. The ones who made it were the āhalf breedsā who had Euro genes from one parent. And that was 4 to 10 generations ago. At this point, a significant number of the hundreds of original tribes are gone, and most of the ones that are left are genetically largely Euro and African.
This is one reason why native tribes do not use genetic testing to āproveā inclusion. The true proof is that someoneās family has been part of the tribe over many generations. Have you lived the lifeā¦thatās what matters. And this family has not lived the life of Native Americans.
Which is ironic, considering the fact that their daughter has lived the life of an African-American woman ā as an adult, which is not the same thing as growing up in a culture, but at least she has walked a small part of the journey.
There are huge issues with this family. Whatās the real reason Dolezal got guardianship of two of her adopted brothers (the ones she pretended were her sons)? Is that related to the sexual abuse? And what has that done to the boys, to be used and lied about like that? Transracial adoptions have a whole list of known issues over and above general adoption issues, and one of them is the issue of splitting their identity between two cultures, living a new and different identity in their adoptive family but perceived as being their original identity when out among strangers. What has this done to the boys, to drop them first into a white dysfunctional family and then into a situation where they get to be black again, but only because the adult responsible for their welfare is pretending to be just like them?
The mind boggles.
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I always thought it was madness that minorities in the US have fought so hard to maintain their cultural and racial heritage until I realized that it was because while being white has always been the best thing to be, being white has always been about being accepted by other white people as white, not about the color of your skin.
There was the one drop rule, and being Irish meanāt you were not white, no matter what your skin color was, Being white has always been arbitrary, all Rachel Dolezal had to do 100 years ago was say her great grandfather was black, no one would have questioned her blackness.
When no such thing can exist in American culture as long as American culture continues to distinguish Black culture as something separate and not a subset of itself.
Iām starting with the assumption that American Black culture grew out of black people not being allowed to participate in White culture, it is as much an expression of the history of black people in the united states as it is bounded by the cruelty of people who went to great length to preserve a (shifting) platonic ideal of what it means to be White.In this sense, if white people cannot stop participating in white culture, then theyāll automatically continue oppressing other cultures as well.
To your point, white people appropriating black culture for their own benefit is a problem, but I wonder how healthy it is to keep cultures from merging at all.
Ultimately I think thereās something brilliant happening here. I donāt know how aware she is of this but just that she dared to deny her whiteness is brilliant, but that she dared to assert that race is 100% a social convention is the bit thatās brilliant and likely rubbing people the wrong way.
Or rather that she dared to say this in America. Many other countries will have no problem with race as a cultural trait so objectively sheās not wrong, anybody asserting that biology dictates race is doing so from the confines of their own social blinders.
The sad part is that this canāt be allowed to happen because of competing interests that lead to the same outcome: Nothing changes.
She canāt be allowed to be black because then black people might also be allowed to be white if they choose to.
She canāt be allowed to claim blackness and get away with it on white privilege only because then black peopleās identity can be seen as a commodity you can enjoy if white and suffer if black.
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I dontā think thatās the goal, rather it should be about sharing on a equal level, yeah?
But she did so by lying to black people, that, in my view is a problem. In the end, I think she just ends up subverting the cause of black equality more than she does subverting white privilege itself.
How we do that, Iām not sure, other than continually plugging away at the idea that itās a dangerous and oppressive construct that serves to insulate people identified and who identify as white from the nasty reality of what that actually supports, which is the oppression of those not coded as whiteā¦
jesus, weāre down the damned rabbit hole with this one, arenāt we? Fuck.
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You are joking about Native Americans, right? There has been well-documented genetic testing to justify excluding many tribal members in recent years - generally motivated by restricting access to wealth produced by tribally-owned businesses.
Thatās not to say that I think it a brilliant method for determining origin - because I donāt think it addresses most of the component elements of origin at all.
Also Iām not sure I follow on the ākilled off by diseaseā front either. Diseases were deliberately introduced in some cases, I know. But first contact between many natives and Europeans occurred in the 1500s, didnāt it? In fact many tribal lifestyles were first made possible by access to horses. So clearly many tribes survived hundreds of years and even thrived after initial contact with Europeans. I would argue that it was deliberately repressive policies that killed the natives (and yes, one of the consequences of these policies was disease.
Anyway, Iām getting away from the point so maybe that should be another thread. Iām in general agreement with you. Her family are looking increasingly dubious and problematic as she is, the family that everyone is taking at face value also seem to be total bullshitters.
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She lied to white people do, if you take the position that that sheās lying.
If she is indeed of Czech, Swedish and German stock and actually looked like this as a teen:
ā¦then sheās phenotypically considerably whiter than I (and Iām pretty damn pale). Plus her family has been culturally white for longer too: Itās only since signs saying āNo dogs, No blacks, No Irishā came down that people with my ancestry have been white enough, apparently ā¦ 
Which in itself goes to show how stupid the whole race thing is ā¦
Edit: sorry @Mindysan33, didnāt mean to reply to your post.
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Your assumptions about the history of Native Americans and how they were affected by the waves of various European tribes is not accurate on many counts. As the most basic example, millions were killed by Euro diseases in the generations before germ theory was understood enough to use those diseases as part of ādeliberately repressive policiesā to continue the slaughter.
Ignorance of history is part of the problem in this family. Their knowledge seems to be sophomoric: they donāt realize that the little they know is only the tip of the iceberg.
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Right, sure. But she lied about being black to black people.
People have been saying that crap ever since he was at UCLA.
Mindy - did you see TNCās take?
"I think race is oppression,ā writes Richard Seymour, āand nothing else.ā Indeed. It is the oppression that matters. In that sense, I care not one iota what Rachel Dolezal does nor what she needs to label herself. I care solely, totally, and completely about what this society does to my son, because of its need to label him.
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I had not! Thanks for postingā¦ I love TNC!
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Iāll bite. Like?
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Youād have to be crazy to not want to be white?
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