Hmmmm . . . here is how it all came out. Weirdness all around I guess.
Absolutely.
Thanks for the link to your posts in the Jenner interview thread. I hadn’t seen them before: they are wonderful.
Romani, since I mentioned chromosomes above, please note that I said I did not endorse such a statement. I did in fact read a book very similar to the one you cite many years ago, before that one was published. Fascinating, illuminating, and thought-provoking. And, one would hope, compassion-provoking, if there is such a term.
I feel that moving away from a binary world view will benefit everyone.
I predict that her statement will prominently figure an abuse story.
Oh… my comment was not directed at you. Apologies for any confusion 
(Also, 100% agree with you about a binary world view. My views on this might surprise people but I don’t think that discussion is necessarily appropriate to post publicly on here for me personally.)
I just wanted to mention, Romani (without derailing the thread further) that Alice Dreger is no friend to trans women. Not the least little bit. She ascribes to some extraordinarily simplistic and outdated theories. A lot of intersex people don’t like her either. Which is too bad, because her writing on some other subjects is interesting.
saintfan, that story is pretty incredible. I think I’ll check back out of this circus. It’s sad, really.
I happen to really like that book. It’s all that I know of from her. My area of interest is historical medicine, not contemporary issues, and for that I think she did a superb job.
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Why does everyone think she is "nuts" or "disturbed?"
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At this point, I don’t think she’s nuts or disturbed either. Maybe when more facts come out, I will. Right now I just think she had some agenda, and thought that pretending to be black was a better means for that agenda.
The NAACP as a group does not require you to be black to be a member or a leader. The group was founded by blacks and whites trying to empower blacks and get rid of the horrible de facto and de jure second class status for blacks.
The problem with this woman isn’t that she was white and a leader, the problem is she has lied about her background, and has physically altered herself so she can claim she is black, and as part of that is claiming she grew up poor and discriminated against, was abused because she was black. When you get leadership role, it happens for a reason, and one of the reasons she might have gotten the position was because she said she had suffered the real issues that blacks face in society so has direct experience with it, which Rachel growing up white did not.
I think the analogy with let’s say a transwoman does have some relevance, but not the way others have said. Rather, what if someone of transgender experience for example joined a group dedicated to stopping the way girls are still treated in the classroom, and claimed she herself experienced that growing up (when she was raised as a boy). She could easily be hired for the position as a woman of trans experience, because she studied the subject, saw it happening in the classroom, and so forth, and that would be fine, but claiming she had that done to her would be an outright falsehood. Claiming an experience you didn’t have is like claiming expertise or a degree you don’t have.
Race is a funny beast, because if you look at the genetics of it, it should be irrelevant. Genetically, now that the human genome has been decoded, the aspect we call race is something like a .01% difference, the physical aspects we attribute to race are basically superficial genetic differences. Yet race is important because of so long, there were claims it made people different, so we can’t just sit back and say race doesn’t matter, it does, as sad as that is to admit. In a sense, Rachel claiming she is black is not outlandish from a genetic standpoint, because her variance from a typical black person is probably that tiny, but that tinyness matters enough that her claiming that is void, on the grounds that she never was identified as black, she never faced what blacks do in their daily lives, so it makes a difference. It is interesting someone made the comment about blacks who could pass as white, those that did had very different lives then those who could not, and as a result would have a very different experience. The interesting part is genetically they could claim to be black (especially given the southern definition that being black meant one drop of black blood, or at least was a common measure), but like Rachel, background wise they would be coming at it from a very different position.
Could there be people who believe they are of a different race, to the point where they literally believe it fully? I think it is possible, there are people who believe all kinds of things that aren’t true and would pass lie detector tests and such, it runs that deep. I don’t think it is the same thing as being transgender, I don’t think a kid is born feeling they are black, maybe Rachel growing up with black siblings correlated being black to being loved, or some other cause, but I doubt it is biologically wired in her brain, given that race itself is a construct (the culture around a group or race is very real, as is the identity, but the idea of a black race or a caucasian race or whatnot is a total construct, which gender identity almost surely is not, you don’t get taught what gender you are, you simply know what you are, whether it is congruent with your body or not). Race is a classification scheme that lacks any kind of scientific or logical backbone to it, it basically was a classification system to create a ‘superior group’ to defend things like colonialism and slavery.
" I don’t think a kid is born feeling they are black, maybe Rachel growing up with black siblings correlated being black to being loved, or some other cause,"
I don’t think she grew up with black siblings. I believe the four adopted siblings are at least 15-20 years younger than her
yep
From the Easterner Online article: …“One of Doležal’s paintings was at a convention center in San Francisco, where her and a trusted mentor went out to dinner together to celebrate the sale. As soon as Doležal looked away, the mentor slipped gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, also called the “date-rape drug,” into her drink. According to Doležal, her mentor took advantage of her that night. She said suing was nearly impossible due to the amount of wealth the man had…” - See more at: http://easterneronline.com/35006/eagle-life/a-life-to-be-heard/#sthash.1aUk3liU.WDr3V1zn.dpuf
Am I the only one thinking “Bill Cosby?”
I doubt anyone as victimized and traumatized as she describes can easily relate all the persecution in a breezy college newspaper interview. My armchair diagnosis is Borderline Personality Disorder.
As a person of color, I have no problem at all with what she is doing. My problem is with the people who support being transgendered and then don’t believe someone should be allowed to be “transracial”. Both gender and race are social constructs. Just because you never fathomed someone wanting to actually become a minority doesn’t mean she can’t feel that way. And shame on her parents going out there and throwing their daughter under the bus like that. And to go on interview circuits trying to publicly shame her? How pathetic
Great post, @musicprnt. You said it so much better than I could have.
Whatever color she feels like she is, her personal history as she relates it is full of lies. She has built a narrative and based a career on that narrative, but large chunks of that are false. e.g. Her parents lived in South Africa from 2002-2006 as missionaries. She was well out of the house by then and did not live there or even visit. He mom said that 3 years before she was born when they were first married her mom and dad did live in a teepee “for awhile in 1974” 3 years before Rachel was born. She’s taken these snippets of truth and woven them together into something fantastical.
http://www.cdapress.com/news/local_news/article_385adfeb-76f3-5050-98b4-d4bf021c423f.html
I was thinking further about the “why do I even care?” angle. What I came to is that I have no dog in the hunt regarding how she fixes her hair, how much self tanner she uses or how she conceptualizes her identity in her own mind. I think it sucks but I also have no dog in the hunt regarding how she has twisted her personal narrative and used others rather poorly to that end. Those are interesting, but in the end pure tabloid fodder. For me the lasting story is that in creating her personal narrative she has woven in what appear to be false accusations of hate crimes and done so out of purely selfish motives. Every time someone like this cries wolf it diminishes the collective response to those who experience real injustice.
I don’t know saintfan, I think it boils down to just plain old lying for personal gain.
Latest news has her postponing tonights meeting.
So it would be interesting to see what the United States would look like in the next 10 to 20 years if the “race box” was no longer used. Do we really need to be quantifying this?
I think asking about race is important in following diseases and doing research with those diseases.
Are our affirmative action laws still bringing positive’s or have they become negative for those groups they are meant to help.
She resigned.
I just wanted to say -that I am a white woman and my hair is almost as kinky/curly as Ms. Dolezal’s hair is. If I let it go and didn’t straighten it.
It probably isn’t terribly important -I just am not assuming that it is a weave.
@calicash-
Gender is not a social construct, it was not created by people the way the concept of racial definition, despite all the yacking from the environment is everything/clean slate at birth folks, studies of gender, both cultural and biologically, have shown that gender was not created by society, but is something inate to people that more than likely is based in biology, both genetics and the fetal development process of mammals. The label male and female is a construct, but how the people feel is not. How gender plays out is to some extent cultural, some extent inate, but the actual gender identity, whatever it is, is not a construct, no matter how we label it. We could dress all babies in jumpsuits of a neutral color, we could give them gender neutral names used at random, we could take away all the cultural signals that drive gender expression, and those kids would still differentiate based on their gender identity, if only in how they felt about themselves, I have no doubt about that, for a number of reasons. Trans people don’t just one day say “oh, wow, I want to be a girl”, it is something they have felt for a long time, probably before they could even enumerate what it was. The only thing that Rachel has in common with trans folks is that she took steps to make herself look more black, much as transgender people do when they transition, but it isn’t the same thing.
And like I and others said, the real problem is that she presents a fictitious background, claims things happened to her growing up that in fact happen to people of color growing up, and used that to establish her credibility as a leader and as a spokesperson for people in the black community, and that is the problem. I don’t know why Rachel claims to be black, and if she feels like that and wants to present like that, that is her business, but if she claimed that she had faced discrimination from police from being a poor woman of color growing up, or claimed she had been assaulted for being a black woman, and used those to achieve a position of authority, it is wrong, pure and simple, that is what I object to. It is the same way I would react to someone who is a trans person, who would say something like “as a transgender person, I can speak with authority what it is like to be black in society”, while both are groups that face horrible discrimination, the experiences are very, very different, and to claim authority of an experience you don’t have based on your background is the problem there, too.