Athos
Well-Known Member
Is it just a matter of degree, then? Genuine question.
White civil rights leader has pretended to be black for years
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Is it just a matter of degree, then? Genuine question.
Athos
Well-Known Member
But it's not really 'plain and simple' just because you assert it; there are people who say exactly the same about what they perceive to be the deception perpetuated by transexuals i.e. as you say she's not black, they say transexuals are not women. I don't, but some do, and I want to understand the difference.
There are loads of possible unfortunate consequences of what Dolezai did both for her immediate family and society more generally but I still can't be sure ,speaking for myself,that her original intentions might not have been good.Some of the people around her must have thought she was making a contribution otherwise the denouement which is now going to be embarrassing for her to say the least would have come sooner.
Athos
Well-Known Member
Would you be ok with her pretending to be black, but being apolitical, then?
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
Well if she had not inserted herself into a political career based on being black then nobody would know
Didn't we have a massive argument once over that?
Blacking up? No. It's unacceptable imo. Because history.
Athos
Well-Known Member
Not being caught is not quite the same as not doing wrong, though.
Athos
Well-Known Member
Didn't we have a massive argument once over that?
Blacking up? No. It's unacceptable imo. Because history.
Yes, in the course of which you offered me out!
But here we agree that what she did was wrong, and that it's different from transexualism. But I still don't think we've got to the bottom exactly why.
Treacle Toes
Time
The difference is 'choice'. Choice is a priviledge. Even if she deceived people thinking she was doing it for 'good' reasons she exercised her choice/priviledge.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
FFS, you know the score here, she's built a career for herself on the back of some staggering deceptions - mini-ongoing deceptions and massive ones in terms of invented relatives. More to the point, she's doing it in a society where black people risk being murdered by the police on a daily basis. Whatever her original motivations, she's played a game with something that shouldn't be a game. This simply isn't the same as the trans discussion, for reasons that should be obvious.
Thora
Differently Ethical
What she did (the deception) was certainly wrong.
However, as a general point - if we accept that identity is an internal feeling rather than based on external markers/lived experience then why shouldn't someone with white parents identify as black? If Rachel Dolezal had just quietly got on with her life, feeling black and living as a black woman, would there be a problem?
However, as a general point - if we accept that identity is an internal feeling rather than based on external markers/lived experience then why shouldn't someone with white parents identify as black? If Rachel Dolezal had just quietly got on with her life, feeling black and living as a black woman, would there be a problem?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Who cares?Who would know? That's what she didn't do.
And more to the point i think here, you're ascribing motives that simply may not exist. It may have just been a con.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Why can't we just condemn a little more? Where's our backbone gone ffs?
Treacle Toes
Time
Identity is more than an internal feeling...it is constructed by lived experience too.
MochaSoul
It's being enslaved of your own free will
My mum is 59. She was born and raised in Angola. Her [African] mum died when she was very young and she was raised with her white aunt (sister to my mum's father). my mum and her brother were the house slaves. At the tender age of 8 my mum had to wake up at 5 or 6am to collect water, feed animals and prepare breakfast for her white cousins before she herself had to go to school which she was allowed in because she were half-white (not that her brother were accorded the same privilege since he was darker-skinned). As soon as her aunt got the possibility of sending her to a nunnery which operated an orphanage off she went. Her white heritage allowed her to become a nurse but even though her grades were impressive it didn't allow her to become a doctor (enter sex discrimination which made it difficult even white Portuguese women from doing so but anyway). She funded her studies with part-time work which she was lucky (again) to look for in areas where other black people were not allowed. My dad is also mixed race but his dad never legitimised him so he didn't get schooling until after I started prep school (we were all living in Portugal by then). This is Portuguese colonial apartheid. Not as well known as the South-African regime but...
I was born in Angola but (since my mum took refuge in Portugal on the onset of the civil war - again, a possibility only afforded her because of her white heritage), I was raised in Portugal. Not only that but my social (school) life only really started when we settled in a rural part of the country. My mum says the next black person she had heard about lived some 30 miles from where we settled. So along with I described I remember my mum teaching me to read and write, then my starting school and then piecemeal episodes like the one when my mum storms into my class room declaring the school is "dumbing my child down" taking me by the arm and sticking me another classroom. It was much later than I found out they had put me in what would have been called the special needs class (with 12 and 13 yr kids with mental ages of 4 or 5). But at least no one disputed my mum's claims.
My son was born here. His dad is a blonde and green eyed white man and you wouldn't know by my son to be mixed race just by his phenotypical features (given also that both my grand fathers were white). But he also has a mum who has educated herself in being black in a white privileged world by looking at and reading up on British historical episodes like the arrival of the Windrush and the subsequent history of the Afro-Caribbean people here (I wouldn't have been able to do this in Portugal - people talked about racism as I was growing up as if it were exclusive to America and South Africa and the white Portuguese awakening to its colonial past happened after I arrived here) and, more or less can take care of herself having educated myself in what it means to be black in a white privileged world because it is a more open-minded world and one that is more reflective about racism). It does not mean that I don't have my moments of asking if I'm dreaming that this is the 21st century when reading about black people being more likely to be put away for reasons of mental illness but compare it with my mum's experience and, well... I see it as evolving. In 100 yrs time people won't be surprised that I can express myself or that I don't particularly identify with what the [western] markets and media confine blackness to, be it hip-hop culture or jazz singing or tribal dancing depending on what they focus on.
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Yes, in the course of which you offered me out!
But here we agree that what she did was wrong, and that it's different from transexualism. But I still don't think we've got to the bottom exactly why.
Well for starters there's a wealth of transsexuals that we can listen to and learn from. Is she the only transracial thus far? And we haven't heard her story yet. How she attempts to justify her actions, if it all. She might be a con artist. She might be ill. We can only speculate.
Treacle Toes
Time
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
do you know about that american thing 'passing'? I heard about it tangenitally when studying literature. It usually went (goes?) the other way though
MochaSoul
It's being enslaved of your own free will
My main question reading that kind of comment is... Identifying with what? What in the blazes do people think being black is defined by? Watching Montel Williams? Having a penchant for running? Dancing like Michael Jackson? Singing the blues? What?
Treacle Toes
Time
I didn't know what word to use.
It's not even funny. It's lazy and LOADED shorthand for something that doesn't exist. It's like anthropologists of old/new observing others and labelling them so they can build a 'framework/theory' about them instead of actually listening to how they identify for themselves.
Thora
Differently Ethical
I don't know, what does identify as a woman mean? People talk about feeling like a woman/women trapped in men's bodies.
You're walking into a trap.
Well how would you have articulated what I was trying to say?
Treacle Toes
Time
How about 'pretending to be Black'? After all that is all we know she has been doing. Making up terminology like 'transracial' is to begin to build a 'theory/framework' based on lazy/loaded assumptions.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
ATOMIC SUPLEX
Member Since: 1985 Post Count: 3
Yes. At the time. I bought the title song too (lou reed). They won't play it on the telly anymore. Despite the guy blacking up, which I guess is never good, it actually addresses some race and class issues and latent racism quite well. Still a bit of a stinker though, and you can never root for the protagonist, because what he does is so fucking stupid and wrong. I guess the point is his journey to discover what his race and privileged upbringing blinded him to.
why not'Transracial'?
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