Used a fake name too
I hope you’ll consider changing the thread title. She’s not a Black professor. She’s a white professor who’s been posing as Black.
Yes, that’s the important thing.
Correction: She admitted she pretended to be Black, not that she is or has ever been.
She was wrong and knows it. I don’t believe in kicking people who are down.
And I hope she has good social support at a time like this.
she only came clean because someone was going to blow the whistle on her.
As with Rachel Dolezal, the problem is not that she identifies as black. The problem is that she is trading in on that identity to receive a post that should be reserved for someone who has been regarded and treated as black for an entire lifetime.
If black people could get academic positions and positions within agencies and organizations as easily as white people — and held the qualifications in equal measure, and could acquire them as readily and so on — it wouldn’t matter so much. But being an officer of the NAACP or holding a position teaching African American history as a college professor are among the few positions where being black works in one’s favor, hence people who were considered white until they chose to identify as black should not be eligible. They have (or historically have had) white privilege.
But simply for identifying as black, that should not be viewed as ethically or socially wrong. To believe that there’s real differences built-in such that one’s personhood is “white” or “black”, that’s empirically wrong. So to say “I am black” is to say in essence “I live in a culture where there are notions about who you are depending on your race, and the person I actually am is a far better match for the cultural notions about ‘black’ than the cultural notions about ‘white’, so I identify as ‘black’.”
Same as gender. There are no reasons to believe that male people have intrinsic differences in who they are as people from female people, but we live in a world that has attitudes and expectations, and some people opt to identify as a sex other than what their mom’s obstetrician wrote on their birth record because they’re a better fit for those social notions than for the ones attached to their birth-assigned sex.
There’s zero solid ground for being totally on-board with transgender identities but opposing transrace identities just because the former is socially established after decades of effort and activism but the latter isn’t being done except by a handful of people who don’t constitute a social movement. Unless you wish to identify as a lemming, that is.
She identifies as someone who, in her cultural view of Blackness, has certain qualities she identifies as Blackness. Maybe she felt downtrodden or misunderstood by people she knew, i.e., white folks. That’s a far different experience than someone who grew up Black. When she was growing up, was she followed around a store because she was Black and therefore, suspect? Did she have people befriend her so they could boast the ultimate Get Out of Jail Free Card, the Black friend? Did people mutter that the reason she got into a good college or got a good job was because of Affirmative Action? Of course not. It’s white privilege to think so.
Blackness is black-eyed peas and collard greens with neckbones and chitlins on New Year’s Day — not just for the eating but for very specific wishing. It is being followed in the store and told what you can and can’t afford by a salesperson whose weekly salary is what you just spent on a casual lunch; it is sitting on the curb outside your apartment building with your hands behind your head, waiting for the police officer to decide if he’s going to let you go or put you in the back of his squad car.
Blackness is all up in the bones — in the sinew.
And it is the ultimate in white privilege, really, for a white woman to see that diamond, all shiny and hard and unbreakable, and pluck it for her own, like it’s a gift from Tiffany’s, with seemingly zero regard for the pressure, the heat, the pain it went through — that we went through — to earn that shine.
You think “transracial” is akin to “transgender”? Think again:
The way in which people compare how Rachel Dolezal identified as black and then was revealed to be of European descent to how transgender women are “really” men pretending to be women reveals the enormous bigotry that many cisgender people have against trans people, more than anything else about race or gender. Some people are willing to make any negative comparison – no matter how far-fetched – to discredit and shame us trans women.
The fundamental difference between Dolezal’s actions and trans people’s is that her decision to identify as black was an active choice, whereas transgender people’s decision to transition is almost always involuntary. Transitioning is the product of a fundamental aspect of our humanity – gender – being foisted upon us over and over again from the time of our birth in a manner inconsistent with our own experience of our genders. Doctors don’t announce our race or color when we are born; they announce our gender. People who are alienated from their presumed gender and define themselves according to another gender have existed since earliest recorded history; race is a medieval European invention. Thus, Dolezal identified as black, but I am a woman, and other trans people are the gender they feel themselves to be.
This assumes that she wouldn’t have been hired, or granted tenure, except for affirmative action. We don’t have evidence of that AFAIK.
She wrote one book, in her field, published by Duke University Press, and a few journal articles. Given that GW doesn’t have one of the world’s greatest history departments, I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that she needed to be Black to get and hold her job.
Lied on her job application? I don’t know. Do they put that question on there? Do they even have a job application for professor?
Lied in her job interview? Apparently. After all these years, it should not be a firing offense.
Lied in the classroom? Not good, but for that an apology should be sufficient.
we have a guy in Congress who looks as white as me but is black. Both his parents were mixed race . His district is gerrymandered to elect a black house rep.
And your point is…?
I could be wrong, but I assume in today’s social-political climate that, no, you would not tend to get a job in African-American studies as a white professor, not when there are black academic folks who are eligible for that job. And I would agree with that attitude, by the way, not in perpetuity but for now, for how things are now, precisely because the academic world has not been rife with equal opportunity for black academics and their activism within academia was responsible for such posts existing in the first place.
^^^ This. It’s not why it’s not okay for her to identify as black — I think it’s okay for her to identify as black. But it’s why it’s not okay for her to manifest as a black professor teaching African-American studies. Edited to Add: I don’t agree that Rachel Dolezal can’t be black. I just don’t think she has any business occupying a paid position in the NAACP while claiming to be black.
Are there any non black professors who teach black history and culture? I assume there may be a few. She looks to have tenure so I guess she will keep her job unless she quits . Tenured people can get fired but it’s a long drawn out process.
Done. My first actual moderation.
Lots.
Look at (and read some of) the books on black history and culture that have, in recent decades, won major awards like the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Bancroft Prize, and then google the relevant authors. Most are professors, and it is a highly integrated group.
they are not allowing her to teach this fall. And a lot of her fellow professors want her canned. They could probably give her crap work hoping she leaves on her own.
she also claimed to be Puerto Rican at some point
she quit her professor job today