Just call yourself whatever you like. I’m black, I’m white, I’m alpha centaurian. Three races in five seconds. It’s all bullshit from the last millennium anyway. I know that some people who are oppressed based on their “race” go for racial pride, emancipation, etc. I won’t argue with them, but I don’t think that road will lead somewhere.
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They seek to raise children under their twisted ideas of discipline, which involve beating, starving, and otherwise abusing children, often to death. They do not care about the kids, but instead mistreat the children. You cannot tell me that someone who whipped a children for 9 hours until she died, and called it part of their philosophy on raising children, did not intend to abuse children.
There is a philosophy, an entire group of white people who as part of their religion adopt children of color, and then end up abusing them. My point was just that these people exist, and a child adopted by white parents isn’t going to be racism-protected, but quite often be worse off.
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I’m pretty familiar with both adoption and religion, and this is the very first time I’ve ever heard anyone make claims anything like this. The words quite often, quoted above, and your repeated assertions that this sort of thing is commonplace are going to require some substantial proof.
I think you’re pushing some egregious, racist, made-up bullshite… but nonetheless I am waiting patiently to hear you provide some evidence.
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My thoughts about it
I find it very interesting to see Jenner generally being celebrated for being brave in valuing internally felt identity over external biology and then changing the latter to suit, while Dolezal is generally pilloried for valuing internally felt identity over external biology and changing the latter to suit. It’s particularly jarring to see Dolezal attacked given the work she’s been doing in the trenches for equality and justice while Jenner has been positioning her transition for maximum exposure and television revenue.
It’s only confusing if you think that there are major differences between the Jenner logic and the Dolezal logic. Seems like you have two people that identify as something that doesn’t strictly match their biology. “Confusion” arises because many people don’t like where that logic leads them.
It’s hip to say that race is completely a social construct, as this vlogger does, but I don’t think that is true. Skin color, hair and body type are largely heritable biological traits. It’s a truism to say that people look more like their genetic parents than the average person on the street. And the human species, and most animals more broadly, are closely attuned to in-group, clannish behavior. It’s one mechanism among many active in natural selection.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a continuum of features. There is. No bright lines delineate groups, especially where historically separate groups intermix. It’s like saying there is no such thing as yellow or blue because there is an infinite range of shades of green between them and different languages might actually categorize one shade as blue that is green in another.
Nor is it to say that individuals along those continuums of traits exist outside of a historical and social context. They do. History and inherited culture are important parts of the social construct aspect of race.
In other words, life is messy and complicated and inconvenient…and wishing something were the case doesn’t make it so.
Edited to delete my “As a lefty” intro…doesn’t really affect why I find differentiated responses interesting.
Racism isn’t really about your genetic lineage, it’s completely about what color you are, or how you look. It’s all outward appearance. You aren’t discriminated against because you’re great grandparents came from Africa, they don’t do genetic testing, they just see you are black and that’s it.
If you want to be culturally African, food, customs, traditions, clothes, that’s great.
Saying you identify as black is as useless as someone who’s black saying they identify as white. I’m pretty sure a racist wouldn’t say “oh, ok, I guess I can give you that job then”.
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I’m glad to see a discussion of this here on BoingBoing.
I have had a couple of interesting experiences related to this Dolezal story.
1 - I knew a woman, aged at the time about 23, who learned during the year or so we were friends that her mother was black. Her mom was a light-skinned African - American from Louisiana - probably descended from a Quadroom or Octoroon (one of the people who were recategorized under the Jim Crow laws as being Black instead of Creole based on have 1/4 or 1/8th black ancestry). Her mom could and did “pass” and my friend was not previously told that her mom was black. When I asked her about her cousins and other relatives, she said that she “just thought that’s how people in Louisiana looked.” Again, I think the whole family was very light-skinned.
When she learned of this she said she told one of her good friends, who is black “I’m a sista now!” to which he warned her, “Be careful about saying that,” and told her that black people would be very wary of accepting her as true “sister.”
2- I went to college with Tim Wise who is, I guess you’d say he’s an Ally of black people. Here’s his recent post on Facebook about the Dolezal case: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10152871470960969&id=140254320968
Funny thing is I was laughing SO hard because this guy - man if he could put cornrows in his hair and some spray tanner and get away with it, he probably would. I mean, some of his stuff is so weirdly white-hateful for a really white guy. And he used to do all the anti-Apartheid rallies at college - which was great, but, a little weird. Yet here he is condemning her for blackface though he is just one tiny step away from it himself.
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Sure, it’s a construct that still have power in our society.
Funny how little you seem to know about this guy you say you went to college with. I’ve read his stuff and seen him speak. He doesn’t hate white people (and it’s, um, funny, how you say he’s so close to being black because of that…), he hates white supremacy. And in his speeches and writings, he’s very explicit about the fact that he’s white, and that his understandings of white supremacy reflect those of black thinkers and teachers, and that it’s sad and frustrating how his largely white audiences are more willing to listen to him say the same damn things just because he’s white. I don’t think that’s “weirdly white-hateful,” I think it’s honest.
And what was weird about being against Apartheid?
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Well. . . it can be a genetic thing, as the Third Reich so clearly showed, with their involved rules about who could be considered a Jew and who couldn’t, and there were Jews who passed as “Aryan” without getting caught (though I understand your point-- in the USA, as it applies to African-Americans, skin color is the most important qualifier, and if you “pass as white” then people will treat you as white.)
And then there’s the White Supremacist trying to build the all-white town in North Dakota. . . and who it turns out is genetically 14% sub-Saharan African. Is he ironically more “black” than Dolezal?
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To me this is the most important difference:
- A person who appears white but self-identifies as black still benefits from white privilege. (For example, a cop is far less likely to pull them over for no good reason.) That goes double if they also benefited from an upbringing in a relatively affluent white community.
- A person who appears to have the body of a man but self-identifies as a woman puts themselves at risk of physical assault and various forms of discrimination just by walking outside their door every morning unless they go out of their way to hide the fact that they are transgendered.
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which community?
‘they’? 'the community**. Who do you mean? Which community? And since you seem to know them, are they open to suggestions?
Sure. My meaning was that trans- is a clumsy word when it comes to race. One that also happens to intersect with a whole other pile of issues. I don’t see it as clarifying anything. That’s my whole point.
Of trans-racial adoptees. But you also see the term used by news organizations (a quick google search shows a ton of hits by NPR), in the titles of studies, etc. It’s the term used - you may not like it for whatever reason, but dismissing it because you’ve “never heard of it”, mocking those who use it, and calling using it “ignorant” is just being ignorant yourself. It’s one of the accepted terms by… well, pretty much everyone but you, it seems like.
We use “clumsy terms” that are divorced from their root words all the time. Jumping on this one seems silly.
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Well, you’re replying to criticisms of your word choice, without replying to my requests for evidence supporting your outrageous claims.
I know a lot of mixed families, many of them built through adoption. I have five different ethnic groups in my immediate family; the pictures in my wallet are every skin color, hair type, eye type, etc. In my US state you have to take classes before you are permitted to adopt, so I have sat in weekly meetings of potential adoptive parents for months, and been through the home study and psychiatric screening that adoptive parents get from the social workers. I also monitor the racist hate groups in my area. I sign up for their literature, and I read it, and I get the Intelligence Report and I read that too.
I have never heard of any of this “racist religions adopting children to abuse them” stuff before. Not from the adoption side, not from the racist side. I want to know more about it, if it’s real.
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I couldn’t get links at the time due to a work filter. Chill.
Keep in mind they don’t see what they’re doing as abusing the children - which is the problem. They treat the children like shit, but think it’s “proper discipline”. Then there’s the white parents who adopt kids and just mistreat them badly in general, but there’s actually a pretty big christian “discipline” movement that’s all about essentially torturing kids. And while yes, they do it to their own biological kids too, they tend to be much harsher with adopted children, and see it as some sort of religious goal to “take in” as many children as possible.
On a book linked to several deaths: Examiner is back - Examiner.com
On the adoption movement among evangelicals: Orphan Fever: The Evangelical Movement’s Adoption Obsession – Mother Jones
The magazine’s Liberia campaign, it turned out, heralded an “orphan theology” movement that has taken hold among mainstream evangelical churches, whose flocks are urged to adopt as an extension of pro-life beliefs, a way to address global poverty, and a means of spreading the Gospel in their homes.
…
Discipline included being hit with rubber hosing or something resembling a riding crop if the children disrespected Serene, rejected her meals, or failed to fill the reservoir. For other infractions, they were made to sleep on the porch without blankets. Engedi, the toddler, was disciplined for her attachment to CeCe. To encourage her bond with Serene, the Allisons would place the child on the floor between them and CeCe and call her. If Engedi went to CeCe instead, the children recalled, the Allisons would spank her until she wet herself.
There are books, multiple, written on how to abuse adopted children: The Worst Adoption Therapy in the World
I’m not saying that all people who adopt are bad (it would be my choice if I ever had kids), or all people who adopt trans-racially are bad. Just that to suggest that black kids who are adopted by white parents are automatically better off or somehow escape some form of prejudice is pretty far off, especially when there are some parents who use their kids like slaves.
If you want more articles I can find them, but I think this backs up what I was saying enough.
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I don’t agree that those links support what you said.
Yes, there are religious groups that believe in harsh discipline (that you and I would both call abuse, although they obviously don’t) and some of those groups also believe in more virtuous practices such as adoption. Some of these groups are not racist, or they are actively anti-racist, and the majority of adoptees in the USA are children of color, while the majority of adoptive parents aren’t. There is a certain simple mathematical inevitability here, obviously, and I’m not going to deny that.
In the first link you provided, the abuse was administered to both the adopted and biological children, and there’s nothing claiming the point of the adoption was to enable abuse of a colored child. The parents are unfit to raise children and should not have been permitted to adopt, certainly.
In the second link, what I read was a sad tale of ignorant but hardworking people trying to do their best to be a positive force in the world, and failing in many ways. This is terribly tragic but hardly supports the idea that nefarious white villains are seeking out black children specifically for abuse.
The third combines these themes; ignorant people buying into a rosy fantasy about perfect post-racial adoption, utterly failing to deal with the hard reality of raising children, and descending into a horrific nightmare. That article deals poorly with attachment disorder, I will note in passing: I personally know the father of an adopted sibling group, who probably wishes he had put his children in cage-beds (which are sometimes used by the world’s best children’s hospitals, incidentally). Having one of your kids put a claw hammer through the other’s skull is a pretty hard thing to deal with; not everyone is equipped to cope with children psychologically damaged by not being loved and held as an infant, and you have to sleep sometimes. Having nothing but archaic religious beliefs to fall back on can clearly make things worse, and there are pop psychology books that are even worse than the bible.
Anyway, there’s a real difference between all these cases and people adopting children specifically to abuse them. In each case, the people had delusions of what God wanted them to do, and delusions about what child-rearing entailed, and fundamental misunderstandings of how parenting works. They believed they’d never need to do any real harm. But parenting can be very easy - some children are just plain simple to raise - or brutally difficult. I have been very lucky not to have encountered anything that I couldn’t handle so far, but I won’t pretend it couldn’t ever happen. If my mind broke under the stress and I started harming my children, that wouldn’t retroactively mean that I’d originally adopted in order to commit crimes, although it would certainly mean that I’d failed both as a parent and as a human being.
Here I can agree with you. That being said, you might be quite upset by my own methods of child rearing, since I’m kind of a “tiger dad” to use the modern parlance. My kids are expected to excel.
''pretty much everyone but me"
“the community”
“silly”
Wikipedia: Interracial adoption - Wikipedia
America Adoptions: American Adoptions - Transracial Adoption: What Adoptive and Birth Parents Need to Know
NPR: Growing Up 'White,' Transracial Adoptee Learned To Be Black : NPR
Havard Law: http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/blj/vol20/morrison.pdf
CNN: Transracial adoptions: A 'feel good' act or no 'big deal'? - CNN.com
PBS: http://www.pbs.org/pov/firstpersonplural/history.php
The fucking dictionary: TRANSRACIAL Definition & Usage Examples | Dictionary.com
The term is actually WAY more common than I thought. Do you have any evidence that it’s not a widely used term, seeing as you couldn’t even do a basic google search?
Also, “This term is widely used” is, in fact, evidence for a term being widely used. It’s not a fallacy.
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Someone mind explaining to me who or what “one of those people” is?
Those who disregards the suffering of marginalized groups in the hands of the elites.
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