Re Rachel Dolezal she is supposed to “address” these charges Monday (tomorrow). Judging by her somewhat combative stance so far I’m interested to see what she is going to say. She (seemingly) has no maneuvering room. Her trellis of fabrications are in tatters so where so you go?
Is she going to double down? The difficulty with he capturing any sympathy due to her being an effective NAACP advocate is that in addition to the awkwardness of mis-representing herself as a black woman she has made seemingly unsupportable abuse charges against her parents (none of which are supported by her siblings) and there is the question if any of the hate crime accusations he has made are also constructions of her imagination.
A reporter asked her if she was African American, and she pretended not to understand the question, so I have a feeling she isn’t actually going to say anything substantial or explain herself.
It appears that they only came forward when she started making elaborate abuse allegations (beaten with a baboon whip for being dark skinned etc) which are unsupported by her siblings and the timeline of where she lived and the fact that her childhood pics show her as a pale skinned, blue eyed blonde.
The problem isn’t that she’s white but that she misrepresented herself, she claimed someone was her father who apparently was not and, perhaps most important, she may have made false claims of being the victim hate crimes.
My guess is that she’ll start by saying that race is purely a social concept, not a biological one. There’s plenty of scholarly opinion to support that. She’ll talk at length about how she’s always identified with black culture and truly believes that she’s black. Then she’ll say that she had to invent the fake backstory because society isn’t ready to accept the notion that people can simply decide what race they are.
She’ll probably throw in a reference to Caitlyn Jenner: “If Bruce Jenner can just decide that he’s really a woman and society accepts that self-identification, then why can’t I decide that I’m black? Society hasn’t quite gotten there yet, but they will! I’m a pioneer!”
If someone points out that she hasn’t experienced racial oppression, maybe she’ll say her parents abused her and how that kinda-sorta counts as oppression. I doubt that she’ll mention the alleged hate crimes she’s experienced (threatening letters in the P.O. box, etc.) because those claims already look pretty dubious.
I’m open minded about the hate crimes thing. If she represented herself as being black, and as a prominent member of that community in a vastly white majority area, it’s quite possible that she was the victim of hate mail or actual race-related harassment. I guess we’ll see. If she fabricated that stuff to pump up her street cred, she’s toast.
As far as I’m concerned these are the issues she needs to address. It’s no skin off my nose if she wants to claim to be black. I really don’t care. That’s between her, her employer, and her co-workers.
The allegations of abuse and hate crimes that she has made in order to bolster . . . something, are, however, beyond the pale.
The hate mail that turned up in the post office box showed no signs of USPS processing. I think the only plausible explanation is that she put that stuff in there herself.
Mentioning the hate mail in her statement tomorrow would reinforce the perception that she has a few screws loose. I suspect she realizes she fucked that up and won’t say anything about it.
She doesn’t seem to me to be self-aware enough to make rational arguments (or seemingly rational arguments) about this. She seems to be rather disconnected from reality and will just double down on her story.
Seems to me that if she was as delusional as people are saying, she wouldn’t have waffled during her confrontation with the TV reporter. That was her opportunity to double down, and she didn’t. She sheepishly admitted that the guy in the photo was her read dad, then when asked point-blank if she was African-American, she chickened out and ran away. Obviously she knew her cover story had collapsed.
I think she has some huge psychological issues with her parents but she doesn’t seem completely irrational.
I know it’s not what the OP meant, but I find it amusing to think she’s being charged with something legally, like 1st Degree Crackerness, or Felonious Honkytude
