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Rachel Dolezal.


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Not sure if anyone is following this. My twitter feed is lit up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/rachel-dolezal-naacp-president-accused-of-lying-about-her-race.html?_r=0

N.A.A.C.P. Leader Rachel Dolezal Posed as Black, Parents Say

http://spokanecda.com/featured/a-radical-mongrel/

My understanding is that she had made some unsubstantiated claims of hate crimes against the offices where she worked and while looking into it, her parents disclosed to the media that she is white and has been posing as black. You can be white and be a member of the NAACP. Some arm chair psychologists are suggesting she has a mental condition. I don't think you can determine that from news stories.

There are all kinds of comparisons. I guess someone used the term trans-racial (whatever that means) so there is a hashtag trending.

 

 

 

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Yeah, said she identified herself as being black. You can't just wish yourself black. She's white! Marrying a black man and having biracial kids (which all the reporters have said she has "black" kids. No, the dad is black, the mom is white, that makes them biracial.) does NOT make you black. She's WHITE.

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Where I thought it got bizarre was when she said that her parents couldn't prove they're her parents (even though they had the birth certificate) because there were no witnesses to her birth and no genetic tests were done. Talk about being in denial.

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I hadn't heard that yet. I've been mostly keeping up on my phone and have not watched any of the videos. I just read what there is to read, but it all pretty much says the same things. So she's completely denying her parents? What the hell? There is something seriously off with her. It has to be just her, coz the brothers that have spoken have only good things to say about the parents and they say the that she is wrong for what she is doing. She needs therapy.

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Yeah, said she identified herself as being black. You can't just wish yourself black. She's white! Marrying a black man and having biracial kids (which all the reporters have said she has "black" kids. No, the dad is black, the mom is white, that makes them biracial.) does NOT make you black. She's WHITE.

It's even more confusing. Her "kids" are boys her parents adopted that she is now guardian for.

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Yeah, said she identified herself as being black. You can't just wish yourself black. She's white! Marrying a black man and having biracial kids (which all the reporters have said she has "black" kids. No, the dad is black, the mom is white, that makes them biracial.) does NOT make you black. She's WHITE.

It's even more confusing. Her "kids" are boys her parents adopted that she is now guardian for.

Really?  I had no idea.  I thought she had been with a black guy and had the kids. 

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The best comment I've seen about this issue is "only a white woman could get so much attention for being black".

It seems like Rachel Dolezal is, once again, taking the stage that should be centered around black voices.  Not to mention poor Caitlyn Jenner, who got totally caught up in the backlash.

I like this vlog by a black trans* women who can speak as part of two of the communities that have been affected:

http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/06/rachel-dolezal-not-transracial/

This is a response from some members and allies of the transracial adoption community, whose language the Rachel Dolezal Thing has coopted:

https://medium.com/@Andy_Marra/an-open-letter-why-co-opting-transracial-in-the-case-of-rachel-dolezal-is-problematic-249f79f6d83c

It's definitely weird and interesting to get caught up in the whole unfolding WTF story, but at the same time, I think it's important to scan the media for voices from the communities impacted by this whole thing. 

 

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I think the fact that her parents are Caucasian  shouldn't invalidate the work she did for the NAACP... However she did quite obviously lie about her heritage and probably other things.  It is definitely not cool to lie about having experienced hate crimes...

I believe that in the future ethnicity is going to be increasingly difficult to categorize in the "multiple choice boxes" way we are used to defining it.  I firmly believe that race is a social construct rather than a finite, measurable or quantifiable idea.  With globalism I think most people are going to increasingly fall into a "mixed" or "multiracial" category.  We are not geographically isolated in the same way we were even 100 years ago, and there is less xenophobia, so it is definitely going to all change... Having said that we have not arrived in a post-racial society yet, and people with certain phenotypical traits are going to experience discrimination more often than others.

An example of the near impossibility of concretely classifying race comes when you think about blood quantum laws for qualifying for Native American tribal enrolment... It seems that because of the small remaining size of the population of Native Americans many people who are culturally still native american no longer have enough "blood quantum" to be enrolled.  It is getting to the point, actually, where unless blood quantum ratios are changed for certain tribes, they may not exist in the future. 

At the same time many people who are predominantly Caucasian and share basically no real remaining cultural tie to Native American culture may identify with that heritage, however minute it may be genetically, possibly out of a sense of romanticism about it, or because it seems interesting or exotic.

Edited by koa
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