A couple days ago I read a few articles on Rachel Dolezal and came to the conclusion that she was suffering from some form of body dysmorphic disorder and I thought it was very sad that this mentally ill woman was being pilloried.
But then I stumbled across, back-to-back, Mike Huckabee attacking transgender people as being imaginary and some random people accusing Caitlin Jenner of being mentally ill and suffering from… body dysmorphic disorder.
And I began to suspect that I may have made a mistake.
Then Dave Chapelle uttered some words of wisdom: “The thing that the media’s gotta be real careful about, that they’re kind of overlooking, is the emotional context of what she means. There’s something that’s very nuanced where she’s highlighting the difference between personal feeling and what’s construct as far as racism is concerned. I don’t know what her agenda is, but there’s an emotional context for black people when they see her and white people when they see her. There’s a lot of feelings that are going to come out behind what’s happening with this lady. And she’s just a person, no matter how we feel about her.”
Dolezal is just one person and her personal experience doesn’t deserve to be held up as the one-grand-truth on this complicated issue. But now I’m looking at progressives who would fight tooth and nail for a person’s right to choose their gender identity and to celebrate their sexual orientation while simultaneously condemning a woman for making a choice about her racial identity, and I find myself wondering whether that’s really just outrageous hypocrisy.
Having just been practicing that hypocrisy myself, I rather suspect that it is.
I don’t know. I’d read a bit further before laying on the white guilt.
Rachel Dolezal has falsely:
1. Claimed a black man was her father
2. Claimed her adopted black brother was her son
3. Claimed she was born in a teepee and lived in South Africa
4. Reported incidents of racial harassment multiple times
She also sued her alma mater for discrimination because she is white.
I believe Ms. Dolezal has a strong identification with African American culture. I also believe she is either mentally ill or has a very strong victimization complex.
“Race” is a social construction, yes. And such constructions can be viewed as fluid and subjective. But I don’t buy that that’s what is happening here. This might be a topic worthy of – maybe that necessitates – a larger cultural conversation, but I don’t think Ms. Dolezal is a good subject for it. Her version of blackness appears to be an ala carte option, taking what would advantage her socially and professionally.
I’m a minority myself (Asian, Korean specifically), and I can understand the anger over her misrepresentations on the part of the black community in the United States.
People don’t ‘choose’ their gender identity. That’s the difference here.
Disagreeing with someone is the gentlest form of “attacking”. Compared to the others…. wolves biting your legs off, getting stabbed. etc.
I was watching the news once and the reporter said “George Bush was attacked today over his position on-” and I was like “oh shit, is he okay?!”. Turns out, he was “attacked” by criticism. He managed to pull through.
Anyway, when two sides have a disagreement and one side is described as “attacking” the other, there’s some very serious spin going on.
It seems like someone may have confused BDD with Gender Dysphoria (See http://roygbiv.jezebel.com/stop-confusing-gender-dysphoria-with-body-dysmorphia-al-1583049920).
Sure, gender and race are both social constructs.
But the experience of race is as much (if not more) about how others identify a person than their personal sense of identity, or “the whole point of the race system is that race is a choice one does not get to make.” (http://theweek.com/articles/560693/difference-between-caitlyn-jenner-rachel-dolezal-explained)
And race is arguably more of a construct, lacking a meaningful genetic reference point in X’s and Y’s (and XXYs, etc. because even sex-by-genotype isn’t simple). One’s gender might be as innate as their sex or sexual orientation, a sense of identity one is born with rather than built for them by society (though it may be tailored by social conventions). (See http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/06/15/rachel_dolezal_caitlyn_jenner_how_transgender_is_different_from_transracial.html)
This is not to say that one cannot possess a meaningful internal identity or affiliation with a community or culture. (See http://www.salon.com/2015/06/15/rachel_dolezal_is_not_caitlyn_jenner_race_and_gender_are_not_the_same/)
Oh, and then there are the power dynamics involved, but I don’t have all day.
@guest: When you’re attempting to take away civil liberties from someone, that’s doing them real and meaningful harm. Describing that as an attack is very accurate. No spin.
@Ramanan: Claiming that X, Y, or Z is really a choice or really isn’t a choice (depending on whichever one is convenient for you and not the person you’re talking about) is Mike Huckabee’s rhetoric and the rhetoric of the Westboro Baptist Church.
I think transgender, transrace, and otherkin are all equally silly — specifically: a little silly, but not very, and I’m more than willing to indulge all three because they hurt me not at all, whereas denying their identities does hurt them.
The thing I think is weirdest about all this is all the people accusing her of “fraud”. Like, are transwomen committing fraud by presenting themselves as women? No, and if you said that you’d piss off a lot of people. And yet I’m having a really hard time seeing the difference.
“Sure, gender and race are both social constructs.”
No, they are not. They are real, actual aspects of a person, & they are not dependent on culture to exist. If everyone on the planet dropped dead, & aliens came down to sort the corpses, they could do so by race & gender, if they so chose. Sure, there would be a not-insignificant Other pile, but race & gender are categories that are real, despite your attempts to ignore them. There are things that are social constructs, like “criminal”, “scientist”, or “pundit”, but if it passes the Alien Corpse Pile Test (patent pending), then it is real.
Also, Dolezal used here adopted racial identity for profit (scholarships, career, etc.), so it counts as fraud. If she was merely an amateur at being black, then it would be a harmless quirk, but she was professionally black, which may actually be a crime.
The underlying physiology of male/female and skin tone are certainly biological in nature. But we’ve built incredibly huge sociological constructs on top of those things, which often have little or nothing to do with the biological “reality”.
The aliens could also sort our corpses by height, but we didn’t spend a few hundred years systematically enslaving and then segregating everyone under 6 feet. The aliens could sort us by eye color, but we don’t have historic ghettos where societal policies stuck all the green-eyed people. They could sort us by hair color, but we don’t have a wide-spread societal belief that “brown-haired people are bad at math”.
Nobody commits mass murder because “the people with freckles are coming to rape our women”.
So simply saying “that guy has black skin, it’s just a scientific fact!” is to very deliberately look at only one small part of the picture.
Apparently Dolezal saw her black adopted siblings get all the affection, she associated being black with being loved. It’s sad, but maybe not particularly weird.
More generally, seeing you or any SJW try to adjust your thinking – Crimestop – on Dolezal, in order to avoid the risk of Crimethink on Jenner, is quite amusing.
Man, S’mon. If you’re accusing people who have defended #Gamergate of being SJWs, I have to assume anyone who isn’t a card-carrying member of the KKK would qualify in your mind.
I guess the KKK were their own form of SJW. >:)
But yeah, I’ll take your point re Gamergate. Just because you buy into one officially approved narrative doesn’t mean you necessarily buy into all of them. And you are troubled by the double standard of the official narratives on Jenner & Dolezal, which again shows you are more thoughtful than a lot of people.
“I think transgender, transrace, and otherkin are all equally silly — specifically: a little silly, but not very, and I’m more than willing to indulge all three because they hurt me not at all, whereas denying their identities does hurt them.”
I’m like a week late to the party, but Malimar managed to capture what I was thinking/feeling much more eloquently that I could have.