Rolling 2015 Thread on Race

if he did it in friday the 13th style i would be all for that.

least believable kimmy schmidt backstory yet

@NickPinkerton
Sorry to report that William Forsythe screaming "God, I wish I was black" in Schrader's Patty Hearst is nowhere to be found online.

http://i.imgur.com/Ii3knHM.png

also, onimo, maybe this will help answer some of yr questions: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/06/rachel_dolezal_claims_to_be_black_the_naacp_official_was_part_of_the_african.html

In her favor are key parts of her life. Dolezal has identified as black for almost 10 years. She’s been heavily involved in the local black community, and a leader on issues important to black people. She has no apparent black ancestry—a real difference from blacks who pass—but she’s adopted a kind of black culture almost wholesale. If Walter Francis White is black, and Mordecai Wyatt Johnson is black, then why can’t Rachel Dolezal be black, even if her connections were manufactured?

Then again, her story involves lies and misrepresentations. She passed off a darker-skinned stranger as her father, and an adopted sibling as her son. There’s a chance she faked a hate crime against her, and she falsely claimed she was born in a tepee with a family that hunted for its food. She says she’s black, but we don’t know if she’s always black. Is she black when she’s purchasing a home? Talking to the police? Or is she black only when vying for a role where lived experience would help her odds?

otm

not really on my money

why can’t Rachel Dolezal be black, even if her connections were manufactured?

The piece is predicated on the unqualified assertion that race is distinct from ethnicity and while this is in some ways arguable he does a pretty poor job unpacking the ways in which they often bleed into one another. As a result the thing reads as confused as Dolezal herself.

claimed she was born in a tepee with a family that hunted for its food.

it's pretty amazing how various and non-binary skin tone really is.

i have one black friend irl total (my excuse is that i'm a shut-in in a 90% white state) and he's always so adamant to me that race is a construct. my instinct at first was to insist that it's a real construct that affects him but at some point i realized i didn't need to do that, it probably does affect him, but if it doesn't actually affect his experience or worldview that much isn't that a good thing and isn't it better to talk about cats or the weird art he makes anyway?

tnc said something on twitter about how even if the racial hierarchy in the u.s. were exploded we'd find another structure just as 'rooted' in 'reality' and just as hierarchical to replace it, which seems to bear out in other parts of the world. way too many of our categorically perceiving and desiring asses out there for our own good or the good of anything else on the planet.

But it does seem like some societies are more oppressive than others? And it's possible to decrease oppression in the aggregate? I hope.

http://jezebel.com/rachel-dolezal-definitely-nailed-the-hair-ill-give-her-1710899988

she also claimed that the kkk and the "aryan nations" were after her in idaho. that could be true though. there isn't a lot to do in idaho.

Metro Spokane often counts Coeur d'Alene Idaho (30 miles east) and its suburbs, one of which is where the major Aryan Nations headquarters was until 2001.

A white supremacist who ran for sheriff is attempting to start up a new one a bit north of there, right near where Ruby Ridge happened, and the gun-nut separatist Citadel is a bit south. There was also a bombing attempt at the MLK parade in Spokane a couple years ago. So none of this is really that far-fetched, there are a lot of racist crazies still around this part of the county.

most of those guys pretending to be aryan imo

Lotta James Frey type defenses on the net.

but the pathological lying is the bit that's problematic in that she not only claims oppression by falsely opting into a culture that's not her own, but outright invented two specific scenarios where she was personally targeted. Even ignoring the damage a fabricated claim can do to the community, it suggests that she is receiving some sort of theatrical gratification out of this, which is pretty gross.

Especially since she can opt out of it any time she wants.

http://i.imgur.com/7oTIdey.png

Omfg

Quit while yr behind sweetie

http://alimichael.org/blog/rachel-dolezal-syndrome/

it's pretty clear that somebody has hijacked her twitter, I think

That account was started last week and has been RTing Milo Yiannopoulos and Andrew Auernheimer so I'd imagine there is a slight possibility it might not actually be her.

Another one claiming to be her real account was supposedly hacked.

https://twitter.com/Retro_Spectro_/status/610251428838420480

A week on, and I am really irritated at the way the media pays way more attention to Rachel Dolezal than they do to the McKinney story. Seems to me McKinney is more applicable to many of us. So many of us have come from suburban backgrounds where people want to keep the pools and parks white, I am wondering if white people just find this too painful to deal with so everyone dropped the story. Keeping black people out of the park is such a big issue in the history of race relations! As a country, we need to talk about it!

McKinney thing just not as weird. also didn't involve a murder, and the cop resigned

as an internet narrative goes, the story is complete

wait what was the murder aspect to the rachel dolezal story

it was murder trying to get her hair to look like that

haha

I didn't mean that there was a murder involved w Dolezal, just that the McKinney thing would've had longer legs if a murder had been involved (rather than general racist officer assholishness followed by immediate resignation)

holy shit

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/bizarre/rachel-dolezal-discrimination-lawsuit-786451

Rachel Dolezal, 37, who headed the NAACP’s Spokane, Washington chapter, sued Howard for discrimination in 2002, the year she graduated from the historically black college with a Master of Fine Arts degree.

According to a Court of Appeals opinion, Dolezal's lawsuit “claimed discrimination based on race, pregnancy, family responsibilities and gender.” She alleged that Smith and other school officials improperly blocked her appointment to a teaching assistant post, rejected her application for a post-graduate instructorship, and denied her scholarship aid while she was a student.

The court opinion also noted that Dolezal claimed that the university’s decision to remove some of her artworks from a February 2001 student exhibition was “motivated by a discriminatory purpose to favor African-American students over” her.

she sued Howard for 'reverse discrimination' basically in '02

aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

was about to post this jelani cobb piece

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/rachel-dolezal-black-like-her

but i just saw that and aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

this just keeps getting better

Is there a patron saint of chutzpah yet?

So this was all a long attempt to go undercover and expose anti-white discrimination from within. Kind of like a James O'Keefe sleeper cell.

Yeah, when this first popped up, O'Keefe was the first person who came to mind.

no joke this was the ad that popped up when i clicked on the jelani cobb post:

http://i.imgur.com/mLmxKey.png

so no Dave Chappelle take?

WaPo quotes him

Okay, the painting thing is great.

discover member privileges

http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/06/rachel-dolezal-plagiarized-painting-the-slave-ship?utm_campaign=complexmag%2Bsocialflow%2B06%2B2015&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

wait did she paint "Sugar Shack" too lol

i wasn't so sure about this one - who wouldn't recognize it as a study of the turner? which is a thing. i see that the blog linked says 'studies', tho who knows, maybe that was added later.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/15/jenner-dolezal-one-trans-good-other-not-so-much

one of my leftist academic-political-activist friends posted this as an argument worthy of consideration and their other academic-activist friends are not having it - takes issue w/ the quick 'transgender is a thing, transracial is not' responses to dumb linkages of caitlyn jenner to dolezal

The transrace/transgender comparison makes clear the conceptual emptiness of the essentializing discourses, and the opportunist politics, that undergird identitarian ideologies. There is no coherent, principled defense of the stance that transgender identity is legitimate but transracial is not, at least not one that would satisfy basic rules of argument. The debate also throws into relief the reality that a notion of social justice that hinges on claims to entitlement based on extra-societal, ascriptive identities is neoliberalism’s critical self-consciousness. In insisting on the political priority of such fictive, naturalized populations identitarianism meshes well with neoliberal naturalization of the structures that reproduce inequality. In that sense it’s not just a pointed coincidence that Dolezal’s critics were appalled with the NAACP for standing behind her work. It may be that one of Rachel Dolezal’s most important contributions to the struggle for social justice may turn out to be having catalyzed, not intentionally to be sure, a discussion that may help us move beyond the identitarian dead end.

I think people were appalled at the NAACP (though were they, really? or is this a straw man) not because they insisted on the right of a person to work for the NAACP regardless of skin color, but because Dolezal was revealed to be a serial fabulist, including making up fake hate crimes against her person. that's not a person you want representing your organization.

speaking to the whole transrace/transgender discussion, i do think there's a sense that:

- dolezal was receiving some of the benefits of her new racial identity without having had to substantively experience the disadvantages

whereas

- jenner arguably--well, in his own narrative--experienced an ongoing crisis of identity and all the negative repercussions of that, over many decades, and his new identity represents a (partial) liberation from those difficulties

so there's a probably a sense that jenner's suffering entitles him to the bold step of assuming a new gender identity, while dolezal's identity change reeks of opportunism.

i don't know how this sort of folk wisdom--a kind of affective justice--would translate into legal terms. probably not very well.

adolph reed is always worth reading i think

xp yes i think basically there is a logic of confession imposed on identity-claiming, at least with respect to gender (a similar one for other kinds of identity, but it is highly polarized in terms of inner/outer distinctions in the case of gender and sexuality: 'the real me', 'a feeling i've always had deep inside', deep or genuine desires at odds with external appearances or roles), and jenner can readily be deemed to have paid the cost/price for his new identity.

whereas dolezal evidently was trying to avoid paying the price.

it's conceivable that she or someone like her could try to get 'coming out as transracial' to become a thing, i.e., she could start trying to pay the cost in terms of which her identity claims would be generally socially validated. but i'm uncertain about just how much claiming racial identity admits of the same sort of inner/outer logic that seems to make gender identity quite amenable to this kind of confessional logic.