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White civil rights leader has pretended to be black for years

8ball said:
The idea of a little person in a person that is the real, conscious essence. Or how the word "soul" is sometimes used.
As if you could "be" a woman "in a man's body", or vice versa, say (I'm simplifying for speed but you get the gist).

No one has taken that sort of thing seriously for a while. It has some resonance with the worlds we create in our heads and our simplest explanations of things, but it's not how anything really works.
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Actually, with out meaning to offend anyone, I would argue that this is precisely the logic in play with some of these gender-display issues. As if liking to wear "a dress" is coded into ones DNA or not. I don't buy into the rationale given re gender re-identity. Trans peoples experiences and desires are real I'm sure but don't see why that has to wheel out and dust off some oldy-time notions I thought were through, the "lady-brain" vs "bloke-brain" concept for example. Can't it just be that some men like to present themselves like women do (in the culture) and that be ok? Maybe in a feminist world we'd have no need for the concept of "trans-gender", I dunno. But I can't see the Jenner approach as being worth much.
 
And once more, just to reassert that as far as bullshit race-labels go as having any reality other than what we inflict on each other on the basis of our limited knowledge of each-other and energy-saving cheats for making sense of the world... I for one welcome Dolezal as a black person. If she looks black enough to worry about being slaughtered by a US police officer or miss out on a job offer- then that's all the authenticity required really. There really isn't anything more to it, this "black" thing anyway- a concept manufactured in Western Europe and their colonies to decide who's land it was ok to grab or who could be kidnapped and sold off to be cannibalized by means of the sugar/cotton industries.
 
camouflage said:
And once more, just to reassert that as far as bullshit race-labels go as having any reality other than what we inflict on each other on the basis of our limited knowledge of each-other and energy-saving cheats for making sense of the world... I for one welcome Dolezal as a black person. If she looks black enough to worry about being slaughtered by a US police officer or miss out on a job offer- then that's all the authenticity required really. There really isn't anything more to it, this "black" thing anyway- a concept manufactured in Western Europe and their colonies to decide who's land it was ok to grab or who could be kidnapped and sold off to be cannibalized by means of the sugar/cotton industries.
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I think you have half a point there about the concept of "race" (which has been used to mean different things by some posters at times on the thread), but I think a lot of people have argued eloquently, in detail and at length about why what Donezal did just isn't on.
 
8ball said:
I think you have half a point there about the concept of "race" (which has been used to mean different things by some posters at times on the thread), but I think a lot of people have argued eloquently, in detail and at length about why what Donezal did just isn't on.
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It's a big-ass thread, could you summarize their main points as you understand them?
 
camouflage said:
It's a big-ass thread, could you summarize their main points as you understand them?
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I just randomly clicked on a page and ran into something right away. It's been repeated plenty of times. It was page 62 by the way.

Just a few of the very basic points which have been well covered:

* She lied
* She contructed stories and let people believe them (such as the story of her black 'Dad'), then played Humpty Dumpty with definitions to cover her tracks
* She chose to put herself in the position where racism affected her, and at an age well advanced of the age at which many of the formative experiences of growing up in a racist environment (on the wrong side of the fence) will have occurred. Which is very different to growing up with those experiences from birth.
* See the middle-8 of Common People by Pulp - she could have walked away at any time, which completely changes the dynamic of any of her experiences of racism, regardless of whether she chose to bottle it or not
* She allowed people in the racial equality movement to invest emotionally in the stories she created, which hurt a lot of people when the truth came out
* She damaged the movement by doing this, and also by bolstering racists who had a field day with the whole thing
* She trivialized the experiences of both racial minorities and transgender people by drawing a dunderheaded equivalence that trammels over the nuances of both situations, as well as digging up a load of the kind of essentialist shite that racists love

I'm pretty certain there are a few things I've missed, but this is just off the top of my head (I type fast).
 
8ball said:
I just randomly clicked on a page and ran into something right away. It's been repeated plenty of times. It was page 62 by the way.

Just a few of the very basic points which have been well covered:

* She lied
* She contructed stories and let people believe them (such as the story of her black 'Dad'), then played Humpty Dumpty with definitions to cover her tracks
* She chose to put herself in the position where racism affected her, and at an age well advanced of the age at which many of the formative experiences of growing up in a racist environment (on the wrong side of the fence) will have occurred. Which is very different to growing up with those experiences from birth.
* See the middle-8 of Common People by Pulp - she could have walked away at any time, which completely changes the dynamic of any of her experiences of racism, regardless of whether she chose to bottle it or not
* She allowed people in the racial equality movement to invest emotionally in the stories she created, which hurt a lot of people when the truth came out
* She damaged the movement by doing this, and also by bolstering racists who had a field day with the whole thing
* She trivialized the experiences of both racial minorities and transgender people by drawing a dunderheaded equivalence that trammels over the nuances of both situations, as well as digging up a load of the kind of essentialist shite that racists love

I'm pretty certain there are a few things I've missed, but this is just off the top of my head (I type fast).
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A point that sticks out to me is the laughable assumption that all black people have experienced racism formatively, they haven't. It's pretty eurocentric to assume they have actually.

"She chose to put herself in the position where racism affected her," :confused:

The common dreams article Apron posted earlier addresses other points in what you've said better than I can, if you've read it do you have any thoughts on that article? It is a bit long.
 
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camouflage said:
A point that sticks out to me is the laughable assumption that all black people have experienced racism formatively, they haven't. It's pretty eurocentric to assume they have actually.

"She chose to put herself in the position where racism affected her," :confused:
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She was working in the civil rights area in a racially troubled locale; this is nothing to do with claiming simplistically that experiencing racist abuse is an absolute factor in living with black skin absolutely anywhere under any conditions
.
camouflage said:
The common dreams article Apron posted earlier addresses other points in what you've said better than I can, if you've read it do you have any thoughts on that article? It is a bit long.
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Just took a look. Not sure where it deals with anything I've said about Dolezal on quick scan - seems to be dealing with the kind of essentialism that Dolezal herself was peddling. :confused:
 
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I think its interesting that we hear almost nothing (relatively) about trans men its all about trans women and TERFS. I reckon there may be something parallel with how Dolezal was a huge story but people 'passing as' white, which has been going on for ages, has never been much of an issue. People declaring themselves by fiat to be part of the subaltern / oppressed group seems to be what makes a story.
 
bimble said:
I think its interesting that we hear almost nothing (relatively) about trans men its all about trans women and TERFS. I reckon there may be something parallel with how Dolezal was a huge story but people 'passing as' white, which has been going on for ages, has never been much of an issue.
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It certainly *has* been a big issue in the past. :confused:
 
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8ball said:
seems to be dealing with the kind of essentialism that Dolezal herself was peddling. :confused:
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I reckon the same re most of the criticism of her ive seen so far, racial essentialism. This is the racist gatekeeping of a racist society beleiving its racist approach to things represents the race-based solution of racist problems. Racist do-gooders and the racially self-assigned, people who beleive in a female or male brain as standing on its own regardless of the years of cumulative experience... the Alt Right... all draw their sustenance from the same identarian well.
 
camouflage said:
I reckon the same re most of the criticism of her ive seen so far, racial essentialism. This is the racist gatekeeping of a racist society beleiving its racist approach to things represents the race-based solution of racist problems. Racist do-gooders and the racially self-assigned, people who beleive in a female or male brain as standing on its own regardless of the years of cumulative experience... the Alt Right... all draw their sustenance from the same identarian well.
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I summed up what I took from the discussions so far. I don’t see you making a coherent counter-argument i that. After I took a little time to (scrappily, admittedly, and mostly from memory) sum it up for you when you claimed you needed a summary, implying you had not read the whole thread, you now claim to have read different things in the thead, which you have declined to quote.

It’s hard to know what argument you want to have here. :confused:
 
8ball said:
I summed up what I took from the discussions so far. I don’t see you making a coherent counter-argument i that. After I took a little time to (scrappily, admittedly, and mostly from memory) sum it up for you when you claimed you needed a summary, implying you had not read the whole thread, you now claim to have read different things in the thead, which you have declined to quote.

It’s hard to know what argument you want to have here. :confused:
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I'm not arguing with you, I wanted to know what your thoughts on the issue were. I've said a few things I think too. I'm not trying to justify an expanded budget for the next fiscal year or anything. So to sum up, it's all racist bollocks really, because that and sexist bollocks is what our world and our minds largely consists of (also poppy-bollocks). That is all.
 
camouflage said:
I'm not arguing with you, I wanted to know what your thoughts on the issue were. I've said a few things I think too. I'm not trying to justify an expanded budget for the next fiscal year or anything. So to sum up, it's all racist bollocks really, because that and sexist bollocks is what our world and our minds largely consists of (also poppy-bollocks). That is all.
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This still doesn’t make much sense to me. Sounds like you are accusing those who are annoyed with Dolezal of racism. I've already summarized why people are pissed off with her for perfectly good reasons.
 
8ball said:
This still doesn’t make much sense to me. Sounds like you are accusing those who are annoyed with Dolezal of racism. I've already summarized why people are pissed off with her for perfectly good reasons.
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Well... yes I am, but only so far as we're all racist/sexist because we live in a racist/sexist world formed by racist/sexist histories and memes. Frankly I'm not sure what's so difficult to wrap your head around about that. Have you never experienced racist or sexist assumptions or projections from nominally "not racist" people out there?
 
On the Dolezal website, the blue lollipops are advertised as red.

I find it hard to believe that’s serious.

Though maybe I’ll go and have another rummage.

Edit: oh, ok, that is dead serious, isn’t it. Oh.
 
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