Dolezal on being black: I didn’t deceive anybody: http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/20/us/rachel-dolezal-vanity-fair-feat/index.html
She says she no longer confused about who she is. She is a black woman and she’s thinking of writing a book about it
I hope she doesn’t think too hard. She hurt herself the last time she did that.
“Black Like Somebody Else”
Again, race is a social construct. It is what we say it is, and last I checked, there is no accredited authority that decides who is black or white or Latino or Asian. So you are if you say you are. US law recognizes that as well. You can put on the census form whatever you want and they don’t make you prove it.
Interesting thought. Consider affirmative action. Could an employer or university just report that it has a bunch of people with light skin tone, descended from Europeans, who view themselves as black? Would that be a legal way to satisfy the requirements of affirmative action?
It worked for Liz Warren. She counted as Native American for the purposes of diversity goals.
No, her claims had nothing to do with diversity goals.
Hell. Black is a construct. “A drop of African blood is African.” Obama is half white, but because guys who fathered children on their slaves didn’t want those children to inherit, a drop of African is African. And yes, everyone was racist in the 19th century when that was decided, and it exists to this day.
By the end of my days of teaching, we were told that kids would decide what they were. So on the state tests, if every kid in my class wanted to mark Asian, they could. We looked at their answer sheets because we had to check their them for completion, not correctness.
Our state school report card listed the groups and the subgroups along with their performance on the tests, so if the kids had decided to mess around it could have been nasty, but they didn’t. The directions we read just told them to mark the correct bubble, and as far as I know, they did.
I used to interview prisoners entering the system. And one of the questions was what ethnicity they considered themselves. And whatever they told me, I’d write it down.
Race is a social construct. But to a significant extent, it’s a collective construct.
So you can consider yourself Black or White or Asian or Hispanic. But you have to accept that other people who encounter you are also going to have an opinion on what race you are. Your opinion may be the most important one but you have to acknowledge that other people have the numbers on their side. You need to face the possibility of social friction if your opinion of your race differs from the majority opinion.
Race… a “social construct”? Huh- so all those blacks with genetic sickle-cell, or Jews with Favism- it’s all in their heads! Just an old ‘social construct’… I am being sarcastic, but to pretend there are no differences in races is I think a little dishonest. Technically you speak the truth. BUT RACHEL DOLEZAL IS NOT BLACK.
What surprised me when I watched Ms Dolezal on video is that she didn’t “talk black”- the stereoptypical slang and Southern-ey sounding black talk. You know what I’m talkin’ 'bout.
Yes, race is a social construct. What do you all a guy with 7 european great-grandparents and one african great-grandparent? Black. Why does being 1/8th african make you black? Because in this country if you have any visible non-european ancestry, you’re not white. In this country, if you had a black parent, you were black, no matter what you looked like. If your grandmother was black, that meant your mother was black, which meant you were black, even if you had straight blond hair and blue eyes and fair skin.
Yes, you could move away from all the people who “knew” you were black, and start a new life as a white person. But that meant moving away from your family and never seeing them again.
The truth is that most black people in America have both african and european (and some native american) ancestry, and just about every black family has a couple of white people in it.
As for things like sickle-cell anemia, it’s true that the trait is much more common in West Africa than it is in Northern Europe. So if you knew an American had the trait, and guessed that they had some West African ancestry, you’d be right more often than not. But the trait is common in malarial zones all over the world, including India, the middle east, Turkey, and the Balkans. It’s not an African trait, any more than dark skin is an African trait. Yeah, lots of Africans are dark skinned. So are lots of people all over the world who aren’t African. And there are plenty of people who have lived in Africa for thousands of years who could pass for European.
So what makes someone black? What makes someone white? There’s no objective test you can administer. You’re black if everyone agrees you’re black, and you’re white if everyone agrees you’re white.
That kind of makes Dolezal white. Most people think she’s white, which makes her white. Just like if everyone around you think you’re black, that makes you black, not matter what percentage of European ancestry you have.
But race isn’t an objective trait. Why do we group people by skin color but not by hair color? Is there any reason to say black is a race and redhead isn’t?
And as Lemur noted, many people have racial backgrounds that are mixed and overlapping. So there is an element of arbitrariness involved.
If “black” is a race because of sickle cell anemia, then “Jew” is also a race due to Tay Sachs. Which makes us a racial minority, not just a religious minority. And therefore should also result in our inclusion in affirmative action policies.
So you want more Jews to be excluded from elite institutions? Because if we went the affirmative action route we’d have to decrease the number of Jews in the Ivy Leagues, not increase.
Also, what affirmative action policies are you talking about? Which institutions have them, and how do they work?