Rolling 2015 Thread on Race

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.

(sorry, didn't mean to say 'his' there for any particular reason, just had the pre-transition identity in mind at that moment)

i think reed is sort of spot on in suggesting that in this actual country, given the way most people understand it works, the idea that passing as black could actually be a "win" in terms of advantage is at least, on first glance, sort of absurd.

come to think of it, i wonder if maybe (some) claims to racial or ethnic identity don't have sort of a semi-confessional logic to them, it's just not structured the same. if you have a jewish background that people don't know about because you don't 'code' as jewish, you can claim it, and you do so by publicizing things about yourself that may not have been apparent to others, but conceptually, they're more things in your past, than they are things inside you. so that kind of claim isn't assessed by others in terms of confession-related costs (the toll of keeping a secret, of not being recognized, the courage of going public, the kinds of integrity displayable), so much as it is in terms of, i wanna say, like a wealth-of-heritage calculation.

i'm skeptical that the reactions to dolezal can really be pried from--or parsed outside of-- the particular individual circumstances of her "case"; we might react very differently to a different instance of someone "passing" as black if his or her motivations weren't so transparently self-serving.

and while i admire adolph reed and agree w/ sterling that he is always worth reading, i think he gets the optics of this particular case too far wrong for his contribution to really count as perceptive. (i.e. he implies that dozelal really /thinks/ she was black, which given the relevations about her lawsuit against howard etc., can't be meaningfully true.)

this part from reed rings rather true:

The issue of the line that Dolezal, who has now resigned her NAACP position, crossed that made her alleged self-representation unacceptable is interesting in this regard only because it highlights contradictions at the core of racial essentialism. In addition to the problems of articulating what confers racial authenticity, if what we have read about her approach to expressing black racial identity is accurate, she seems to have embraced an essentialist version of being black no less than do her outraged critics.

Dolezal is trans-racial the same way Tootsie is trans-gender. Right?

there's a whole further-afield thing about identifying as Japanese, as an old woman, etc, that you find on lol Tumblr

probably always been the case that some people feel like they relate better to communities other than the ones they come from, but that last step of "no, it's not just that I prefer the company of old people, I'm old" is the point at which most people, me included, are gonna say "well no says here you're 22"

important article on "transracial"

http://mediadiversified.org/2015/06/15/transracial-doesnt-mean-what-rachel-dolezal-thinks-it-means/

(i, personally, would not use that word to describe this experience, though)

I am disturbed by the signifiers in her pictures. When she's in her blackface mode, she is very self-aware. She sticks her boobs out a lot, what is she saying here about black women. I understand you were unhappy being white, but that doesn't make you black. The pictures are creepy, disrespecting and violating to black women. Scary now that she gets an interview and still isn't sorry. So she's essentially a predator.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/rachel-dolezal-older-brother-accused-child-molestation-article-1.2257560

"well no says here you're 22"

No, no, no that's my assigned birthdate.

Dolezal isn't really helping matters any.

http://www.today.com/news/rachel-dolezal-speaks-today-show-matt-lauer-after-naacp-resignation-t26371

'identify as black'

SINCE THE AGE OF FIVE

funny how that reed thing looks nearly the same as the shit that ran yesterday on NRO

In insisting on the political priority of such fictive, naturalized populations identitarianism meshes well with neoliberal naturalization of the structures that reproduce inequality.

too bad, man, these are your troops! this is who you have with you. these are the cadres history has given you (or w/e) i guess i'd love to hear some clearer thinking from marxians about how they are going to lead these populations out of the identitarian dead end; something beyond being a huge bitch about "republican jenner."

In that sense it’s not just a pointed coincidence that Dolezal’s critics were appalled with the NAACP for standing behind her work.

can nobody read a press release? the NAACP chapter was, as blandly as possible, telling the world that they'd been humiliated and were going to deal with it off-camera.

'identify as black'

SINCE THE AGE OF FIVE

you know, when Johnny Otis used to say this at least it was because he knew it was funny

https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/45-darryl.jpg?w=650&h=462

"I really don't see why they're in such a rush to whitewash some of the work that I have done and who I am and how I have identified," Rachel Dolezal said of her parents.

can i just...

She's right though what's the rush? They really should take their time with it. Drop bombs every few weeks just as everybody is about to forget about it.

This seems like someone who doesn't want to accept that she's toast. Reality TV material.

http://cdn.hark.com/images/000/359/922/359922/original.jpg

How good are the odds that she gets a spot on The View by the end of the year?

http://thehardtimes.net/2015/06/16/rachel-dolezal-now-claiming-to-be-founding-member-of-bad-brains/

i think the best word for this saga--all of it--is "grotesque"

is she getting a lot of shit from the African-American community? kinda hard for me to tell

oh you have no idea

http://verysmartbrothas.com/nothing-wrong-with-making-jokes-about-ridiculous-ass-rachel-dolezal/

the whole thing has reminded me of a conceptual framework I used to find compelling, which is that you can think of ethnic definitions as being enforced from without, rather than from within, an ethnic group. For ex. if the white slaveowner said you were black, for all intents and purposes you were effectively black; or if the Nazi said you were a Jew, well then you were a Jew. Basically you get defined by the enemy, by the power structure. (Obviously this is not entirely accurate as there are various nuances and exceptions but still)

xp