Absolutely. There’s a huge difference between her as a human being and her past actions. What I don’t understand is the discourse of “she’s clearly troubled and I feel compassion for her and her family as a fellow human being, therefore it is 100% okay that she defrauded people and did all of those things, and if you question her actions then you, yourself, are the real monster.”
It’s mostly happening because she’s white, which garners her huge heapings of sympathy.
It’s the same effect that’s in play with the largely white victims of the opioid crisis (who “need help”) versus those of the crack crisis (who “need prison time.”)
She is the one in a position to state it, but has well-documented history of deception:
They are welcome to try. However, unlike the person in this case, I don’t have a history of lying about my family and background to: educational institutions, employers, government agencies, etc…
Your loss
Alright I don’t know if this worth the time to read, but I sounded like a dick earlier and want to present a good faith critique.
There is no “black community” and that phrase is reductive and arguably racist. There are individuals perceived as lacking whiteness or having blackness, who, due to to sociologically enforced constructions, are excluded from the benefits of whiteness and subject to structural and physical violence. I’ve been going to anti-oppression workshops since the anti-globalization era and am familiar with the (accurate) material assessment of privilege, as well as the unfortunate coded language, authoritarian tactics, and viciously enforced groupthink. It ends up being very counterproductive. As Dragonowl points out (more convenient link)
Negative effects of anti-oppression normativity are paradoxically felt most strongly by the oppressed – poor whites, Black people, young people, people with psychological problems, and newcomers to a movement – who are less accustomed to self-policing their social appearance, less able to do so, or less aware of the operative norms. IPs thus close down radical groups into tightly bordered sects. Gelderloos deems the emphasis on micro-oppressions a kind of purism which seeks to banish deviance so as to create a monolithic personality-type (18). In practice, what is being challenged is not the person’s degree of complicity in regimes of oppression, but the extent of their knowledge of the appropriate anti-oppressive terminology and related normative codes.
I agree with this 100%. Diallo is a real asshole, and I’m sure we (her included) would all be happy never hearing about her again. What I find objectionable is the both the gleeful punching down, the coded language (“perpetrator” is generally reserved for rapists, in my experience, which first got my hackles up), and the moral certainty of the position (not to mention that the people most affected by outrage are her POC familty). I’d expect the response to her crimes to be commensurate with that of theft, rather than that of the full force of toxic call-out culture and shaming in the age of social media. It’s something that Dragonowl identifies:
This political style boundary-polices identities in a way which renders them rigid and authoritarian […] Usually, these attacks take the form of militant struggle from the Maoist milieu: public denunciation and/or disruption, criticism/self-criticism, purging/ exclusion, and the policing of micro-oppressions within the movement or scene; activists refuse to draw distinctions between allies and sympathisers, active enemies, and anything in-between.
Flower Bomb is more succinct:
They will continue to guilt you for having “white” skin. They will guilt you when you stand up and act out against the authority of their studies and academic jargon. They will continue to threaten you with call out statements, ostracizing, and maybe even physical violence as long as you refuse to psychological submit to their program.
I’ve seen where this fundamentalism leads, first in Pittsburgh, when some Maoist idpols told some Jews to go back to Europe and destroyed their things, and then during Chicago’s Pilsen purge, wherein all white anarchists were purged from a Latino/Polish neighborhood, leaving many poor folks, including POC (such as my roommates), scrambling to find housing. What happened if we didn’t move? Another friend was told she would be raped. That’s the immediate danger of unchecked toxic call-out culture. I probably don’t need to mention it, but white nationalists are the most perfectly formed picture of what the strict policing of racial constructs looks like (that’s not meant as an insult or a statement of equivalence, just an observation).
It looks to me that the outrage isn’t about stealing something. People get robbed every day. It’s is about transgression against and defense of the moral sanctity of constructed taxonomies - as Dragonowl would put it, Stirnerian spectres - rather than living people.
Here’s a timely story:
As race is a system developed in the 1500’s to subjugate darker skinned people - saying one is transracial makes no more sense than saying one is transmercantalist or transphlogistanist.
In appropriating the language around transgender people- who have existed in all cultures and throughout human experience and arguably have a biological basis to their beings - this is used to undermine whatever small enfranchisement trans people have earned.
That’s an insult to the many black people who do consider themselves members of a race-based community. Who are you to throw semantic quibbles at them when they organize against forces that oppress them? Especially considering how effectively they’ve long done so?
No doubt, but acknowledging that doesn’t necessarily lead to the idea that people should discard the notion of a black community. Indeed, that very notion is an effective tool for fighting against exclusion from the benefits of whiteness and being subjected to structural and physical violence.
While we’re at it…
These are about cultural appropriation rather than fraud, so they don’t directly relate to Dolezal. But they’re interesting nonetheless:
I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t consider this a semantic quibble, but a fundamental to racism and patriarchy. Think of it this way: when someone’s grandmother says something about “the blacks” you might think to yourself “That’s racist as fuck. She’s taken a localized experience and generalized it into a racialized mass.” I certainly would. The idea is foundational for post-structural feminists and post-left anarchists, and not uncommon among left communists.
I certainly don’t think people shouldn’t organize around common experiences or culture. That’s absolutely not what I’m saying. The fact that the shorthand is helpful gives us some clues, though. Who is it most helpful too? Those at the wheel have found a way to respect calls for diversity and place token POC in places of power while the wealth gap grows, the food desert widens, and life expectancy drops. Despite the fact that there are more black folks on TV shows, life has been getting worse for many years. They do it with a straight face and an earnest tone, and truth be told, they’re not lying about honoring calls for representation. In fact they took it seriously.
Oh, P.S. I’m not one of those “class is the only contradiction” guys. I understand that it’s rare for people to disagree on a level above trolling because everything sucks and every word online is inherently performative so you keep your guard up, but I don’t, like, hate SJWs or whatever. I’ve been thinking about the importance of criticism for both the subject and the object a lot lately. Especially lately. I don’t think I’m particularly good at criticizing, but I’m good at reading criticism.
I sympathize with your efforts to understand and articulate some High Theory, but you’re still basically saying that those who use the concept of race as an organizing tool are delusional – uncool thing to say, bruh. It’s instead one tool among others, and an effective one, however wrongly it’s used in other ways.
Have you looked into Third Wave Feminism?
Again, those problems are not reasons to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Just because the concept of race has been used toward bad ends doesn’t mean it can’t also be used toward good ones.
Sure, I was reading Butler and hooks in the 90s. I grew to find post-feminism (y’know, the good kind) more interesting and applicable as a way of understanding the world, partly through Judith Butler. She was a real bridge.
I sympathize with your efforts to understand and articulate some High Theory, but you’re still basically saying that those who use the concept of race as an organizing tool are delusional – uncool thing to say, bruh. It’s instead one tool among others, and an effective one, however wrongly it’s used in other ways.
I think there is pure theory, but it’s pretty abstract stuff. Any theory worth reading is just a way to understand how we organize the world. Critical race theory, for example, is the framework that gave us an understanding of what the totality of white supremacy really looks like. It’s not something that consciously came together, but it’s real and describing it is necessary if we want to defeat it.
I think there’s a lack of imagination on the left, a feeling that the struggle against some particular oppressions will be happening forever and we’ll always be losing. I think there will always be oppression, but the idea that it will always look the same or affect the same people, not so much. I think it’s important to get right because our struggles really will undoubtedly have far reaching and unpredictable effects. Who would have thought that an internecine tiff at the Second International would have given us both Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy? They really shouldn’t have banned the anarchists.
Alright, this is getting long again, but I want to note that it’s also important to get it right because authoritarian politics can tear communities apart
.
A year ago, on February 28, 2013, at an event titled “Patriarchy and the Movement,” I watched as a friend of mine attempted to pose several questions based on her experience trying to address domestic violence and other abuse in the context of radical organizing.
“Why have the forms of accountability processes that we’ve seen in radical subcultures so regularly failed?” she asked. “Is there a tension between supporting a survivor’s healing and holding perpetrators accountable?”
At that point she was, quite literally, shouted down. An angry roar came up from the crowd, from both the audience and the panelists. It quickly became impossible to hear her and, after a few seconds, she simply stopped trying to speak.
The weeks that followed produced an atmosphere of distrust and recrimination unlike anything I had experienced in more than twenty years of radical organizing.
Hmm, buckets and buckets of words, and none of them on the topic I addressed – your unwarranted derision for the (practically useful) concept of a black community.
Wow, so not only is she’s a fraud wrt to racial identity she decided to expand to other things like welfare. Way to go, Rachel, you’re making the world a worse place. 9_9
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