Rachel Dolezal II

[zanahoria]

If we get a few more will they start claiming their rights?

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/03/jessica-krug-white-professor-pretended-black

Well, in the twentieth century at least.

I don't think any seriously academic argues that race isn't a social construct. The divisions are arbitrary and political and based on cosmetic differences. However, social constructs are still real and have real consequences.

On the other hand sex isn't a social construct. Sexual reproduction existed long before humans turned up. It's only a social construct if your world view is based on the Matrix.

I liked her comment “black people and black communities have no obligation to harbour the refuse from non-black societies”. So true. I wonder if there are any parallels to be drawn from this 🧐?

serious academic.

I think people experience racism and sexism because of visible characteristics. Others perceive their characteristics and push their stereotypes onto them as a result.
Thats why I feel differently about Lennon to how I feel about Dolezal. Lennon was perceived by others as black his whole life and suffered racism as a result. His actual heritage is not relevant to that, although I can appreciate black people would be infuriated he got funding for BAME actors.

Rachel Dolezal chose to present herself in a particular way. She actively identified herself into an oppressed group. That's very different to me and a lot more analogous to trans women. I find it offensive to act like oppression is something you choose to experience, rather than something thrust upon you.

[quote ChattyLion]There was a male actor/director who was in the press for having white ancestry as far back as he could go, but who had adopted a mixed race identity and then accepted specific industry funding as a BAME recipient.

This man has had a couple of big interviews about his life in the Guardian and a number of theatre colleagues wrote a public letter in support of him. The funders said it was an exceptional situation and I think called for nuance. This was in the UK not the US, unlike Dolezal and Krug, but the media reaction does seem to have been relatively more understanding/nuanced on his situation than on theirs.

www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/07/anthony-lennon-theatre-director-accused-of-passing-as-black-interview-simon-hattenstone[/quote]
I've read the piece and I can understand why he got more nuance.

Lennon’s DNA test showed he was more than a quarter West African. Wherever his ancestry came from, he is biracial and he looks biracial.

@MoreHippoThanPenguin

I liked her comment “black people and black communities have no obligation to harbour the refuse from non-black societies”. So true. I wonder if there are any parallels to be drawn from this 🧐?

Isn’t it interesting? It is of course, what GC feminists have been saying all along. Women have no responsibility to take on and support any non-females in their spaces. Our concerns and priorities are for females. I’m not going to stretch to calling transwomen they refuse of masculinity’ but it is astonishing that this type of speech is heralded as brave and necessary in one section of society and slammed as unequivocally unforgivable in another. And please don’t delete this. It is not my contention that transwomen are refuse, save that they are treated like that by their own sex.

It's so strange to me that sex has been framed as a social construct that one can identify out of, while race is treated like an objective property. Surely it should be the other way around? I just can't understand why there is so much outrage about people claiming to be black or mixed race, but nothing but adoration and support for people who claim to be the opposite sex.

@NecessaryScene1

If only she'd claimed to be a man as well. Then people would have had to tie themselves up defending why she is definitely a man but not black.

There was such a case in Canada recently - Gwen Benaway.

They had to work quite hard to pretend that their claim to be indigenous was outrageous while totally ignoring any issues about their claim to be a woman.

Made my head hurt a bit.

That's an interesting case, thanks. Reminds me a bit of Chloe Jennings-White, who identifies as a trans woman and trans-abled; he wears leg braces and uses a wheelchair and fantasises about being paraplegic but is perfectly able-bodied. All the coverage of him focused on the BIID and "trans-abledness" and how offensive it was to actual wheelchair users and paraplegic people, but his claims to be a woman were barely mentioned.

All part of the toxic culture around race in America where a person who presents as white to any reasonable person can somehow claim blackness. I know it's derived from the horrible 'one-drop' laws during slavery that forced people who were had any minimal black ancestry to live in segregated communities but that was 60+ years ago and it's time to move on. Americans, both black and white, still act like a tiny smidgen of African heritage somehow defines a person's race entirely rather than accepting that multi-racial people have complex, variable identities that don't fit in one box.

That's what allows a woman like Jessica Krug to claim blackness. In any other country that wasn't so obsessed with detecting every tiny drop of blackness, she would have been far too white to pass off her fake identity.

@WeeBisom

It's so strange to me that sex has been framed as a social construct that one can identify out of, while race is treated like an objective property. Surely it should be the other way around? I just can't understand why there is so much outrage about people claiming to be black or mixed race, but nothing but adoration and support for people who claim to be the opposite sex.

Well, that's what "queer theory" is all about. "Queering" means "to unsettle or complicate normative practices, spaces, or discourses".

Obviously, "normative discourses" are more often than not correct and well-researched, rather than being false and made up just to oppress people. So most of the time people applying queer theory are going to end up on the opposite side of reality.

Sane people know that race is basically immaterial, except socially, and there's no fundamental reason for the social aspects to apply for skin colour any more than hair colour. Whereas sex has some significant biological consequences which means females will always have a different starting position to males that must be recognised.

As those are the dominant views, you need to "queer" and flip both - make race a super important identity and sex immaterial.

This is all part of the whole critical social justice assault on truth, and it also functions as part of the in-group/out-group thing. You prove allegiance to the group by reciting the daft beliefs.

But for sex denial in particular, it's taken on with such enthusiasm (more than, say, 2+2=5 or "decolonising" physics), because it really scratches the itch of a lot of quite unpleasant males, and inconveniences basically no males.

Jane Clare Jones has a few times pointed out that, now that queer theory seems to be dominant, it's surely our duty to queer it back! That's what we're doing folks - queering transnormative concepts of womanhood.

America where a person who presents as white to any reasonable person can somehow claim blackness.

I see it as buying what the racists are selling, and I think we do it in this country too. Unintentionally many, many people talk as if race is real and determinative of character. The wokestasi are awful for this but it seeps into everyday consciousness.

Of course it's complex to discuss subtle racism without giving it's assumptions any shrift- but if it was easy then racism would be fixed by now.c

Relevant JCJ article: "How to disappear patriarchy in three easy steps".

Specific snippets:

It follows from the half reasonable claim that social norms function to produce subjects, and morphs pretty seamlessly into the claim that descriptions of social phenomena become normative, and hence actually work to produce the things they describe. When coupled with the belief that there is no basis for an account of ‘the kind of things that are harmful to humans’ (and certainly not one that says anything as gauche as ‘domination is harmful to humans’), you basically end up with an alleged system of critique that has no moral calculus other than ‘norms are BAD.’ (Oh hai there Queer Theory, towering over the academy, not being normative in the slightest.)

...

This, as with all third wave feminism, is just so much male-pandering bullshit. For reasons I’ve yet to get to the bottom of, I spent a good deal of time trying to work out how the modern-day intersectional catechism was in any way coherent, until I realised that the only thing that held it all together was that it all benefited men.

@rainwaterflow

Lennon’s DNA test showed he was more than a quarter West African. Wherever his ancestry came from, he is biracial and he looks biracial.

What an ugly word.

What an ugly word.

Why?

What word do you use to describe your own multi/mixed racial background?

Ja Du and Daphne Shaed also spring to mind, white trans women who also identify as a different race. They've been quite rightly called racist but little focus if any on them appropriating womanhood. They may well identify with a lot of Filipina and Indian Hindu culture and genuinely wish they were of those cultures, but they're not being respectful of them to claim they ARE those things. If they'd said they were white westerners but had an interest in these cultures and wanted to learn more about them and visit them and get along with people from them, that'd be fine, but claiming to BE from that culture is wrong. Like plenty of men say they have mostly or only female friends and get on well with women, that's fine, but saying they ARE women is where it crosses the line from identifying WITH into identifying AS, and that's invasive.

Either it's fine to name yourself as something you in actual fact are not, based on your feelings and personal choice, and be granted all the same resources, funding, societal provision as those who actually are that thing, or it's not. One or the other.

Either it's fine to have 50 year old blokes in nappies skipping around at preschools and teenagers necking leaves in the giraffe paddock, and taxpayers funding non disabled people to have carers and adapted cars for their personal choice in using a wheelchair, or there are limits and boundaries people have to deal with in their lives.

(I identify as not speeding, officer. Your camera footage there is hate and bigotry, because speed is on a spectrum and you cannot define my inner sense of time/space movement.)

Basically it's a matter of epistemological and ontological ideas coming together

It should be illegal to inflict this kind of wankery on people in public places without first sounding a mandatory alarm and giving them time to get away.

Anthony Lennon looks like he has black ancestry. I wouldn't need telling, my eyes can do the job. A quick Google has some childhood photos of him and the same was true then as well. Whereas neither Rachel Dolezal nor Jess Krug look remotely black. Neither of them are even olive skinned! I'd never heard of either before they came out as white, and I know hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it astounds me that anyone believed them. I'm not saying there couldn't possibly be any male privilege at play either, but there's a difference between outright lies and not.

I also think Jess Krug is getting a particularly hard time because apparently she was pretty obnoxious, frequently to black and Latino women moving in the same circles. I haven't read her book but have heard she called a black female academic she disagreed with a 'slave catcher'. Whereas I'm not aware of any suggestion that either Lennon or Dolezal behaved like that.

Does anyone know if there has been a response to the ‘call for Gwen Benaway to be accountable to the Indigenous communities …’?

Has it dropped off the radar because Benaway is trans?