Hispanic isn’t a race.
Justonedad, I very much doubt that you judge the sex or gender of anyone you see or meet on the street, or anywhere else, by examining their chromosomes. In fact, except in extraordinarily rare circumstances, nobody does. Including when a person is born. So that’s an absurd standard. The most important difference between Rachel Dolezal and me? She’s a liar and a fraud. I’m not. This is a woman who brought a lawsuit against her former employer claiming she was discriminated against because she is white! Don’t try to tell me she has a “transracial” identity or anything else. She’s never even tried to claim that. And even if she were claiming that she’s “transracial,” it still wouldn’t be comparable. (See my comment explaining my reasoning at http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/18574019/#Comment_18574019. If you still think it’s the same thing, so be it.)
This whole Rachel the Fraud story is so bizzare… Catch me if you can of sorts!
Here is an interview published back in Feb. with Dolezal sitting in front of her “original” painting. She describes her life and also the painting to the woman interviewing her. She named her painting “the Return”
I would say narcissistic pathological liar but her parents never allude to her weaving lies as a kid. It is all a very interesting study of behavior in a train wreck sort of way.
http://easterneronline.com/35006/eagle-life/a-life-to-be-heard/#sthash.oBDPPBvj.dpbs
There is no such thing as a “baboon whip” as she claims of her experiences in South Africa. The correct term for what she presumably means is “sjambok”, a heavy leather whip made of rhino or hippo skin.
Good grief, now she will be interviewed on the Today show. I am so over this woman, and this story. There are far more important things going on in the world. Honestly, I cant believe this has garnered so much national attention.
The whole argument that equates being transracial to transgender is silly to me. If and that is a big if, I were inclined to believe the whole transracial argument,she killed that with her lawsuit against Howard. She used race when it benefited her, and she is pathological liar. Hey, let me be one of the few whites that attends an HBCU, oh but I will sue. Now that I have my credentials, let me put on my black face so that I can be hired for jobs looking for diversity.
She sickens me. For her to coop the black persons experience, especially a black females experience, sickens me. As I said, she couldve remained white and been down with the cause. We are very accepting. Heck the NAACP was founded by whites. There are plenty of Whites who are empathetic to our causes who dont go around making a mockery of our experiences.
He tries, he does try, but she slithers away from most questions.
http://www.today.com/news/rachel-dolezal-speaks-today-show-matt-lauer-after-naacp-resignation-t26371
Sadly, she thinks she has to be a black woman to be a proper Mom to her black adopted son (former adopted brother).
Ward Churchill part two.
Too bad Rachel couldn’t have been interviewed by Brian Williams. That would have been so fabulist!
Isn’t one of her sons her biological child from her ex-husband?
No! Don’t give this leech any money!
Yes!
@LakeWashington Yes, I believe she has one biological son named Franklin.
I dunno, I watched the Matt Lauer interview and I am trying hard to remain empathetic but objective. I thought she handled herself well with Lauer. Calling herself “Black” because she has a Black son could be rationalized because of her world view, just like Jeb Bush heavily identifies with Mexican culture because of his Latin wife and children. And the intra-family squabble muddies the waters.
@JustOneDad -
People with gender dysphoria don’t decide to change their gender, their gender is their gender, what they do is take steps to make their bodies match their gender. As psych pointed out (and I am glad this is being taught in biology classes, about how complex fetal development is in mammals, especially human beings) gender identity is more than likely wired into the brain through a series of events in utero, and for some people, for whatever reasons, it happens differently. Gender itself is more complex than this, some people don’t identity as male or female binary (most do), some identity as mixed gender/gender blurred/no gender for example, but the one thing in common is their identity is there, it isn’t created. Intersex people (those born where they have a mix of genital and secondary sex characteristics of both sexes) are similar to gender dysphoric people, in that the fetal development process caused them to develop that way (from what I know, most intersex people have normal XX/XY configurations on the sex hormones), the hormone baths and such didn’t work the way it does with most people and the intersex condition is the result. Interestingly, more than a few intersex people end up with some form of gender dysphoria, because the tendency always had been when faced with an intersex child to ‘make them normal’, so if a child, for example, displayed predominantly male characteristics, they would operate to make the child look like a ‘normal’ male…and later on, that same person might end up identifying as female and transition (I believe that these days it is why there is a push not to do that, to allow the child to get older and to be able to express how they felt in terms of gender, in part because of it being common that intersex kids ended up being chosen for the ‘wrong’ gender).
The confusion with gender fluidity and such tends to be because people are putting together gender identity and gender expression, and it is in expression that you see things like social constructs at play, or fluidity. A butch gay woman dressing very ‘mannish’ is likely to see herself as a woman, the androgynous emo boy probably still id’s as a boy…it doesn’t surprise me, people put a lot of weight on how someone presents as defining what they are, like assuming a boy who is a fashion plate must be gay or something. The comment that you can tell the sex of someone by looking at them in some ways is analogous. There are genetic women who because of the way they look and appear, get taken as men, there are androgynous men who get ma’amed all the time. There are people with XY sex chromosomes whose bodies formed as women (androgen insensitivity), there are people with weird chromosomes (XXY for example)…
Race is very different, while there is a genetic component to racial characteristics (body features, hair texture, skin color, etc), race itself is a construct, it isn’t wired into us, those were groupings created by people that in reality have no real basis in anything, other than grouping people by literally surface deep characteristics.
That doesn’t mean someone can’t deeply identity with another culture, another race, another identity and want to be part of that world, but it is not the same thing as being transgender, that cross identity is not inbred, it is not biological, so it is different. That doesn’t mean people don’t have the right to go where there heart tells them, it just means it is different.
For the record, I don’t think people are giving her a hard time for her identity, what they are giving her a hard time for is claiming to be born black, claiming to have had all these experiences she didn’t have, that is the problem, it is about honest and credibility.
“To be rational, the belief that one is living in the “wrong body” has to be backed up by science (not just individual feelings) and it is”
I strongly disagree with this. The science is new. Trans people are not. Their existence and the legitimacy of their experience did not come into being nor become rational when the science came out, and it would not end if the scientific consensus changed.
Suppose we found strong empirical evidence of environmental factors contributing to identity formation in some trans people. So what? That wouldn’t change the fact that they are trans, nor our obligation to acknowledge that reality.
I think that religion is a good illustration here. Religion is not biological. It can change in adulthood, sometimes multiple times. That doesn’t make anyone’s religious identity less real or less worthy of respect. Most religious people feel that their beliefs are not a choice: the beliefs reflect the truth as they understand it and go straight to the core of their being.
For those of you whom are not familiar with Professor Andrew Hacker, he wrote a fascinating book on race relations. Here’s a bit of the 1995 review of the book from the Chicago Tribune, describing in part the perception of “race” in the U.S.A.
"The parable postulates a visit from a government official to a white student to inform him that, according to the records, he was to have been born black and that the error must be rectified. “So at midnight,” the visitor explains, “you will become black. And this will mean not simply a darker skin, but the bodily and facial features associated with African ancestry. However, inside, you will be the person you always were. Your knowledge and ideas will remain intact. But outwardly you will not be recognizable to anyone you know.” Since the mistaken birth to white parents was not the student’s fault, the official offers compensation: “How much financial recompense would you request?”
Most white students find it reasonable to ask for “$50 million, or $1 million for each coming black year,” Hacker reports. “And this calculation conveys, as well as anything, the value that white people place on their own skins. Indeed, to be white is to possess a gift whose value can be appreciated only after it is taken away. . . . The money would be used, as best it could, to buy protection from the discriminations and danger white people know they would face once they were perceived to be black.”
Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race. One can be a white latino/a, black latino/a, asian latino/a, or any swirl of those three, and many are.
I think she is nuts. While I’m sure there will be posters that disagree with me I wouldn’t be surprised if she “convinced” this victim that she was molested.
http://www.people.com/article/rachel-dolezal-naacp-criminal-case-colorado
Who cares what race someone “identifies” with? What matters is what race someone “legally” is, because that determines the affirmative action benefits they are eligible for.
Here’s another angle: why did a white missionary’s daughter from MT end up at HBCUs?
Maybe she we already interested in Africana topics, but I think it’s more likely that she/her parents were chasing merit money. Being poor missionaries and all.
Merit aid doesn’t come free. Rachel Dolezal shows the price you can pay.
Hanna-
"That doesn’t make anyone’s religious identity less real or less worthy of respect. Most religious people feel that their beliefs are not a choice: the beliefs reflect the truth as they understand it and go straight to the core of their being.
I think this is very true, and I support the right to self determination. However, it also raises another question, and I think it is fundamental to the issue you are talking about, that it doesn’t matter if being trans is biological or not. It is one thing to respect religious belief, but one of the biggest opponents to people’s right of self determination is in of itself belief. So for example, to use an analogy, people of certain religious beliefs oppose legal same sex marriage, because their firmly held belief is that their religion forbids it…do we respect that belief, that it be extended to the law (and I realize you are not someone who is going to argue that). There are states where a transgender person cannot change their birth certificate or if same sex marriage is illegal, marry someone of the sex opposite to who they are (ie Caitlyn Jenner could not marry a man), and that is based primarily in religious belief…
What it boils down to me is that a person has the right to self determination, the right to strongly held beliefs, as long as in doing so they aren’t hurting anyone else. Whether a transgender person is biological or not should be irrelevant, if it is what they need to do, since what they do affects no one else. On the other hand, strongly held religious belief needs to end at the person who holds it when it comes to affecting others, someone’s religious belief, no matter how strongly held, should tell someone else how to live their life…so religion may not be a good example, when strongly held religious belief has been used to deny trans people and others the right to self determination…