Passing?

[wesw]

I knew that you were gonna catch that.....

her parents said that they had a baboon whip too, but that they used it to repel baboons....

[BoSoxGal]

Her parents didn't seek out the press to destroy her career - nothing of the kind. They simply responded with the truth when the press sought them out. They've known she was lying about her racial background since 2007 and didn't say anything until last week, when the Spokane press sought them out in connection with a police investigation of Rachel regarding her allegations that she'd been the victim of racial hate mail (that was never postmarked).

I've been watching her interview with Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC - she is very articulate and likeable, but the more I watch it, the more it's obvious how deeply disturbed she is.

Here's the interview with the parents from Fox News - they seem like normal, nice Montana salt of the earth. I think it's particularly sad that they've been denied the opportunity to know their grandson because she didn't want her pals in the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene areas to know her parents were white.

[Econoline]

Hmmmmmm.....

The Rest Of Rachel Dolezar's Story
By Susie Madrak

When I read this last night, the details of this baffling story clicked into place and I said, "Oh, that makes complete sense." It was always weird that her parents went to such lengths to out her, and there was never any clear reason why they did so. Now there is. Fundie wingnut parents (her parents are creationists who believe the world was created 6,000 years ago), harsh child abuse? Yeah, I wouldn't want anything to do with them, either. Via Homeschoolers Anonymous:

We are covering Rachel Dolezal’s situation because she is a homeschool alumna. Rachel was homeschooled through Christian Liberty Academy. Her father, Larry Dolezal, worked for Creation Ministries International and was charged in 1999 with felony theft though the charges were later dismissed.

We have also heard testimonies from numerous homeschool alumni who grew up knowing the Dolezal family that frequent and significant child abuse occurred in the family. The parents allegedly forced both Rachel and her older, biological brother Joshua to beat their younger, adopted siblings with plumbing supply line and two foot long glue sticks, a practice inspired by Michael and Debi Pearl’s book, To Train Up a Child. (Forced sibling-to-sibling corporal punishment is sadly not uncommon in some homeschooling circles.) Such a practice conjures up troubling images of Larry and Carri Williams, another homeschooling family that abused to death their adopted child, Hana.

According to our sources, infant spanking (in public in their church parking lot, even) and blanket training were also common in the Dolezal family. Additionally, Rachel’s adopted brother Izaiah Dolezal has himself raised public allegations against his parents involving physical punishment, forced labor, and isolation in out-of-state group homes.

With this background in mind, now comes the latest development in the Rachel Dolezal saga: Dolezal’s older brother Joshua is awaiting trial on charges he sexually abused a black child. Insinuations have been made that the parents spoke up now to retaliate against Rachel’s attempts to get her brother charged for abuse.

Because of this latest development, we believe the following statement from Carmen Green is important. Please do keep in mind that this statement is not meant in any way to dismiss the wrongness of cultural appropriation or the lies stated by Rachel regarding her history. This statement does, however, add another dimension of complexity to this whole story that needs to be considered.

*****

I have a complicated thing to say.

The Rachel Dolezal story has everyone up in arms right now, accusing her of racism, appropriation, and flat-out fraud. I don’t think I’m qualified to talk about the racial aspects of this story, but I am very concerned about this:

The national media has gleefully paired itself with Rachel’s parents and is now just one more tool that her parents are using against her.

Rachel is an abuse victim. She cut off her parents years ago, and she received guardianship of one of her adopted brothers. Her biological brother currently faces charges for sexual assault, and Rachel has, apparently, been aiding the victim of that crime, prompting her parents--after years of not having any relationship with Rachel--to retaliate by outing her.

Every time we go after Rachel, we are doing exactly what her abusive parents want. Read their quotes. Their tone, their word choice--it’s what I’ve seen again and again from abusive parents, hiding behind their own self-righteousness. They want you to hate Rachel. They want you to believe that she is lying about them. They want you to hurt her.

Abuse victims are complicated people. They can and do hurt others. They can and do make awful decisions. But blaming and pointing fingers at them without acknowledging the searing impact of child abuse doesn’t help anyone but their abusers--who want, more than anything, for you to believe that everything is the victim’s fault.

Please, when you discuss this case, do so in a way that will not make Rachel’s abusers happy.

[Crackpot]

Wow that's a healthy dose of victim blaming

[Lord Jim]

We have also heard ...

The parents allegedly...

According to our sources...

Insinuations have been made...

Wow, it's tough to argue with something that rock-solid....

BSG has it exactly right:

Her parents didn't seek out the press to destroy her career - nothing of the kind. They simply responded with the truth when the press sought them out. They've known she was lying about her racial background since 2007 and didn't say anything until last week, when the Spokane press sought them out in connection with a police investigation of Rachel regarding her allegations that she'd been the victim of racial hate mail (that was never postmarked).

Dolezal got hoisted on her own petard when her clinical need for attention drove her to go a step too far with the fake hate mail...

It is mind boggling to me that with a list of things like this on here record, (not "alleged", known facts; again I'm quoting BSG)

1) Sued Howard claiming race discrimination - two courts found her allegations to be unfounded and to some degree, factually untrue. (Was ordered to reimburse Howard for costs, in part because she refused to participate in an independent medical/psychological exam that was court-ordered . . . hmm, I wonder why?)

2) Began passing herself as black and in the process estranged herself from her parents (who would not participate in her lie) and then falsely (according to her siblings) accused them of being violent toward her.

3) Lied about who her father was, lied about his experiences with law enforcement.

4) Lied about being subject to racial attacks via the mail.

5) Plagiarized at least one of her paintings; who knows how much more of her art was stolen from other artists?

6) Lied about her brother being her son - did so again just this morning on the Today show.

(I would add lied about being bi-racial to get on the Spokane police oversight commission...)

there are actually some people trying to figure out a way to excuse her actions and instead blame her parents...

[RayThom]

The abuse has been so bad that she needs a reality show to let us know just how miserable her life has been.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/06/16/rache ... lity-show/

Here's Rachel in her early experimental days at Howard University:


Now, the question everybody needs to know... will she ever go back?

[BoSoxGal]

The better question is - will she ever go away??????

[BoSoxGal]

By the way, that article gets almost everything wrong - watch the interview with the parents. They are unified with Rachel in decrying the sexual abuse allegations against their son, for one thing. They also point out that the very clear public record establishes several other lies she's told, because she never lived with them in South Africa so she couldn't have been beaten with a baboon stick while living with them there.

She's a pathological liar, period - which to my mind automatically calls into question ANY assertion she makes about her family of origin.

Public spanking is not abuse. If more incorrigible children were publicly spanked, we'd have fewer in juvenile detention/youth court.

Crazy curls Dolezal is also now saying that for all she knows her parents aren't even her parents because her birth certificate wasn't issued until a month after her home birth. Wonder if she'll fork over one of those heavily processed hairs for DNA testing as part of her reality show?

Barf.

[MajGenl.Meade]

[Gob]

Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who for more than 10 years pretended she was black, promotes herself as transracial in her new memoir, published this week. How seriously are we expected to take this latest incarnation?

Dolezal, who recently changed her name to Nkechi Diallo, a mixture of Nigerian Igbo and Fula, claims that her book, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World, was written partly “to just encourage people to be exactly who they are”. This comes two years after she was found to have deceived the people of Spokane, Washington, where she was a race activist and branch president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The book invites us to recognise Dolezal as the race equivalent of the transgender TV star Caitlyn Jenner: the casualty of a society that cast her in the wrong racial category at birth. She says that growing up with white parents and adopted black siblings, she drew pictures of herself with brown skin and curly hair.

The express-your-real-self argument appears reasonable enough on the surface, especially at a time when half of young people define gender on a spectrum. If people can transition from one gender to another, why not from one race to another? Why shouldn’t we define ourselves afresh if we feel another description better reflects our inner selves? Fluidity for everyone, right?

Dolezal is correct to argue that race is largely a social construct rather than a science. And her transracial claims flag up the difficulties around defining who we are. Many official documents ask us to classify our racialised selves using a convoluted system, as Arwa Madhawi wrote last week. The most recent census in the UK, in 2011, split our ethnic identity choices into a staggering 17 sub-groups. I’ve fluctuated across various categories over the years including “Afro-Caribbean”, “African-Caribbean”, “Black British” and “Mixed (White and Black Caribbean)”. Bizarrely, I was recently asked to describe my ethnic origin over the counter, as I applied to renew my parking permit. I replied that I couldn’t answer unless I knew the options on offer. So it’s true, as Dolezal says, that there is no fixed definition of “black” or “white” people: our monitoring system is evidence of a non-binary principle at work.



https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... race-white

[Joe Guy]

Michael Jackson's daughter, Paris, is black too but apparently she doesn't wear makeup to accentuate her race....

[RayThom]

Oddly, Al Jolson claimed to be white.

[Big RR]

Michael Jackson's daughter, Paris, is black too but apparently she doesn't wear makeup to accentuate her race....

But she may be wearing makeup to de-accentuate it--she learned that from dad.

[liberty]

If race is just a social construct, why is it that forensic anthropologist can identity a murder victim’s race from the victims bones.

No we live a physical world and no amount of wishful thinking can change that no matter how desperately I wish it could. My son has down syndrome, you look at him and you can see it and it kills me. I would give my own life if I could change his, but nothing can be done about it.

[BoSoxGal]

That's shite; while there are variations in bone & dental structure & skin color between Homo sapiens descended from different regions of the world, race IS a purely social construct.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98485&page=1

[rubato]

An interesting opinion from the always-thoughtful Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:

http://time.com/3921404/rachel-dolezal- ... ul-jabbar/

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Let Rachel Dolezal Be as Black as She Wants to Be
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Jun 15, 2015
Ideas
Abdul-Jabbar is a six-time NBA champion and league Most Valuable Player. He is the author of the new book, Writings on the Wall.

I sympathize with the dilemma of Rachel Dolezal, the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP whose parents maintain that she is not any part black, as she has claimed (#whiteisthenewblack). See, I too have been living a lie. For the past 50 years I’ve been keeping up this public charade, pretending to be something I’m not. Finally, in the wake of so many recent personal revelations by prominent people, I’ve decided to come out with the truth.

I am not tall (#shortstuff).

Although I’ve been claiming to be 7’2” for many decades, the truth is that I’m 5’8”. And that’s when I first get out of bed in the morning. Just goes to show, you tell a lie often enough and people believe you. I expect there will be some who will demand I give back the championship rings and titles that I accumulated during my college and professional basketball career because I was only able to win them by convincing other players that they had no chance against my superior height. How could these achievements have any lasting meaning if I’m not really as tall as Wikipedia says I am?
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The evidence against Dolezal does seem pretty damning. Her birth parents have decided to express their parental love by outing her in response to a legal dispute they have with her (#returnworld’sbestparentstrophy). They offered photos of a farm-fresh Rachel looking like she just stepped out of the General Store in Mayberry and a white-on-white birth certificate. Some siblings have also attested that she’s not black, though she was raised alongside four adopted black children. Dolezal herself has just stepped aside from her position at the NAACP.

Despite all this, you can't deny that Dolezal has proven herself a fierce and unrelenting champion for African-Americans politically and culturally. Perhaps some of this sensitivity comes from her adoptive black siblings. Whatever the reason, she has been fighting the fight for several years and seemingly doing a first-rate job. Not only has she led her local chapter of the NAACP, she teaches classes related to African-American culture at Eastern Washington University and is chairwoman of a police oversight committee monitoring fairness in police activities. Bottom line: The black community is better off because of her efforts.

At no time in history has the challenge of personal identity seemed more relevant. Olympic champion Bruce Jenner struggled for years with her gender identity and only at the age of 65, as Caitlyn Jenner, seems to have come to some peace with it. The same with many in the gay community who have battled internal and external demons before embracing their true selves. The difference is that these people faced a biological imperative rather than a free will choice of orientation (#readthesciencebeforepostingoutrage). Dolezal chose to identify with a racial group she was not born into, like Sean Connery as the Japanese expert in Rising Sun.

The thing about race is that, scientifically, there is no such thing. As far back as 1950, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released the conclusions of an international group of anthropologists, geneticists, sociologists, and psychologists that stated that the concept of race was not a scientific entity but a myth. Since then, one scientific group after another has issued similar conclusions. What we use to determine race is really nothing more than some haphazard physical characteristics, cultural histories, and social conventions that distinguish one group from another. But, for the sake of communication, we will continue to misuse the word, myself included, in order to discuss our social issues so everyone understands them. As far as Dolezal is concerned, technically, since there is no such thing as race, she’s merely selected a cultural preference of which cultural group she most identifies with. Who can blame her? Anyone who listens to the Isaac Hayes song, “Shaft,” wants to be black—for a little while anyway (#who’sthecatwhowon’tcopout).

Al Jolson, once considered the most popular entertainer in the world, rose to fame wearing blackface. He also used his considerable influence to help blacks. At one time, he was the only white man allowed into some of the nightclubs in Harlem. Ironically, Jolson admitted that when he performed the same songs without blackface he never felt he did as good a job. Some critics say it’s because while singing in blackface, he was singing for all downtrodden people, including his own Jewish people. And he found his strength and passion and power while identifying with another culture. Maybe like Quentin Tarantino in Jackie Brown and Django Unchained.

So, does it really matter whether Rachel Dolezal is black or white?

Dr. King said we should be judged by the content of character rather than color of skin, which is what makes this case so difficult. So, yes, it does matter. Apparently lying to employers and the public you’re representing when the lie benefits you personally and professionally is a deficit in character. However, the fight for equality is too important to all Americans to lose someone as passionate as she is and who has accomplished as much as she has. This seems more a case of her standing up and saying, “I am Spartacus!” rather than a conspiracy to defraud. Let’s give her a Bill Clinton Get Out of Jail Free card on this one (#Ididnothavesex) and let her get back to doing what she clearly does exceptionally well—making America more American.

It’s given me the courage to also say, “I am Spartacus. All 5’8” of me.”

yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who for more than 10 years pretended she was black, promotes herself as transracial in her new memoir, published this week. How seriously are we expected to take this latest incarnation?
..."

Re: Passing?

Postby rubato » Tue Jun 16, 2015 6:19 am
So what's next? Book deal?


yrs,
rubato

Should have put a wager on it.

yrs,
rubato

[Burning Petard]

"the always-thoughtful Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:"

Yep. As part of my observation of national events in the last few months, I am regarding this BB star, along with former SNL star Al Franken, as individuals with serious national political possibilities.

snailgate.

[rubato]

Kareem is an interesting guy. I have read a number of his opinion pieces in recent years and I am very impressed with his seriousness, thoughtfulness, and individuality of perspective. He often says something valuable while most of the commentators are just echoing each other. His piece on the 'outing' of the owner of the LA clippers is one example.

https://kareemabduljabbar.com/

yrs,
rubato

[dales]

Better when he was Lew Alcindor.