I doubt that is the only reason for her difficulties along the way. Her family is estranged, she has difficulty with relationships ( in business too, apparently). When you are applying for a position it takes one google search to see all the good stuff and bad stuff. I don’t see her as a victim, but she seems to want to be portrayed that way. Sells more books.
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Rachel Dolezal did a service. Racial identity is a social construct. Black and White are identity, not genetics.
There are many instances of families slipping into Whiteness over the generations. Why not the other direction?
What Dolezal did shocks us because we can’t believe she would prefer Black over White.
She deceived with regard to her genes as a byproduct of choosing her identity. There were few explicit lies, and they weren’t about important things. The deception, not the lies, is what disturbs people.
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Not about Dolezal in particular but out of more general curiosity – so there is this thing called gender dysphoria, which has been much researched and recognized. And for those people it’s not about lifestyle choice.
Is there such a thing as racial dysphoria in a similar way and if so how much has it been studied?
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Hey! Rachel . There’s a call for you on line 2. It’s the WH asking you to come interview for KACon’s Job…
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I wrote Rachel recently asking her to run against Cathy for congress. She is focused these days on her beautiful grandchild and family. I wish there was something I could do for her.
Thank you I agree with you.
She lied about being black. I know that “race” is a social construct, but it’s been a social construct for thousands of years now, and we’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
Caitlyn Jenner “lied” in the sense that she didn’t share her true self until very late in the game—but she revealed it herself, and Rachel didn’t.
She unintentionally harmed the cause she was fighting for by not saying then what she says now—that she identified as black despite being Caucasian. If she’d been up front from the beginning, she’d still be a force for good instead of being unemployed.
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Again, hardly the first ‘victim’ crying on the public stage.
Her life is her life but I, personally, do not feel she deserves to be ruined for the ‘mistake’ of imagining herself to be black, I’d rather think of her behavior as social climbing than a mistake. 
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No, it’s shocking because she wasn’t honest with us, or with herself.
Her preference isn’t hard to believe, really. But her dissembling made it an issue.
No – that is not it at all. The problem is not with her style or interest in African American culture. The shock is the elaborate lie and construct of a completely false personal narrative to gain sympathy and advantage for herself by appropriating another persecuted group’s history. We would not accept this from someone claiming to be a survivor of the Holocaust – and then discovered to have invented the entire story.
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I never did get the Dolezal hate. As far as I could see she never had any issues besides the whole identification thing. She wasn’t corrupt. She never tried to hurt any other group. She did her job. Can anyone come up with anything she actually did besides represent herself in a socially unacceptable manner? It seems to me that In her case the concept of "cultural appropriation’ was used to take her down.
So much for freedom of expression.
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I think y’all are way way too hard on Rachel. I really do.
@faeyin - thanks. I agree - she was trying to do good things for the community she wants to be a part of.
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I am angrier that Dolezal appropriated the language and struggle of trans people ('I identity as") to mask her deceit. That action diminishes what trans people really go through. There is no ‘feeling black’. Race is an external construct. It’s more about how others see you and treat you in society…whereas sexual orientation is innate biology (she claims to be bi-sexual as well).
But appropriating (ie lying) is what Dolezal does:
■She appropriated “sounding black” in a phone interview to receive a college scholarship
■She appropriated blackness in her college admissions essay on “the atrocities so many [of her] ancestors faced in America” in the context of black history.
■She appropriated the struggles of being a black woman (even their black hair care issues) while teaching what she called: “race and culture classes”, “black studies” and “black feminism”.
■She appropriated being punished for her skin complexion by her mother and “white stepfather”, and compared this alleged punishment to the punishment suffered by black slaves. (That didn’t happen at all and she has no stepfather --black or otherwise).
■She appropriated being a victim of racism by filing “hate crime” claiming she woke to find a noose on her porch and an envelope containing threats that had no postage stamps, barcodes or any other indication of having been handled by the postal service and with the story of how her black father" had fled the Deep South “because a white cop was hunting him”.
■She even appropriated her artwork with her “The Shape of Our Kind,” that was a nearly identical copy of J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 work The Slave Ship.
■She claimed to have had cervical cancer 2006, but recovered by 2008. Her brother says that was the first he’d ever heard of it. So it would seem that she appropriated being a cancer survivor too.
A white woman with an affinity for black culture could have been a powerful ally. There was no need to fake being black for a scholarship – those are open to all races. There was no need to fake being black to work for the NAACP. Half of their founders were white and they currently have white chairs as well. There was no need to fake being black to teach African Studies in college. There is no racial requirement to be an instructor. But she had to be extra, and take it to ridiculous levels (including the illegal ones of plagiarism and filing false police reports).
Oddly enough…in 2002, she sued Howard University, alleging that she was denied scholarship funds, a teaching assistant position and other opportunities, because she is a white woman.
She is a lying liar who doesn’t care about the communities she harms…and I don’t feel sorry for her one bit.
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Its not Faking anything any more than Caitlyn growing her hair out and putting on a dress.
It’s just not. Y’all can argue all the side issues around this as much as you want. There is basically no difference with gender and race in this situation and no matter what you throw up around Rachel’s decision, she wasn’t faking anything.
She sincerely identified as black. Just like transgenders sincerely identify as the other gender. They mostly aren’t public like Caitlyn - they present as the other gender and they don’t tell you that they are something else.
There is no difference.
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Just like millions of other underemployed people in this country. Also too, very few WalMart type jobs pay enough to keep one off food stamps, Medicaid and the streets.
um, yeah…there is. But good on you for extracting only part of a sentence from all of the evidence I presented to try (and fail) to make your point.
But hey…you tried. Here’s a cookie.
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We have a “person” in the WH right now who is passing himself off as a president with seemingly few consequences for all his lies. At least she used her fabrications to try to make things better. I hope she can recover from this. She deserves another chance. At least in my opinion.
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Has anyone accepted her calling herself black? It looks like she’s suffered for that, not found acceptance. What some of us think is that she really doesn’t deserve the degree of hatred some folks spew. Like I said earlier, she appears to have worked hard as the head of the NAACP in Spokane, that should mean something.
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We don’t know that she does not care. That argument calls for speculation, your honor, as it’s difficult to know what someone thinks and feels unless they tell us and all she’s told us is that she thinks and feels black. I don’t get the anger. If she really felt she was black then then of course she could do all of those things. I think you might make an argument that she was delusional but that’s not really a reason to feel angry with someone. Unless, of course, there’s something else going on. Perhaps the problem is with you and the larger culture?
Plus, race doesn’t really exist except as a cultural construct anyway. Hence someone with just a “drop” of blood could have been discriminated against back in the past. 1/16 black ancestry was all it took to bar one from society 100 years ago. Where’s the cut off? What’s the acceptable amount of blood before we can be “black?” Technically everyone has a bit, you know, as we are all supposedly originally from Africa. Now, according to your argument above she essentially plagiarized . I agree that’s wrong. But then again, I do not think your anger really merits ruining a woman’s life.
This whole thing smacks of misplaced vengeance. Frankly, it reminds me of what people said to transfolk not long ago. Like, “you are not a woman, how dare you try to break into our sacred space.” This argument is called “essentialism” and it’s a dangerous path to tread.
Anyway, that’s my way of thinking anyway. I really do not understand the sense of betrayal people feel toward someone who hasn’t effectively harmed anyone, except maybe herself. As far as I can tell she’s guilty of the crime of wanting to be black. I could care less if she “deceived” people in this way if she really wants to be black.
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She sees herself as due a certain level – university professor, administrative head of a respected organization, an artiste and author. So maybe she might have to take a lowly clerical job until someone buys the movie rights to her book. This is clearly unjust!
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