This imposter should be fired.She has been lying about her ethnicity and paid to give talks about being a black woman in the US.She claimed to be the victim of hate crimes because she is black. A journalist who investigated the claims has found many inconsistencies in her recounting of the incidents and tracked down the parents in the course of the investigation.I find it extremely offensive that this white woman usurped and appropriated blackness for her benefit. Why couldn't she live in her skin while working as an activist lime Tim Wise?
The idea that Dolezal's choice to publicly identify as a black woman --- one who occupied positions of power in spaces specifically designated for members of a marginalized group --- is the same as being a trans woman, simply doesn't add up.What Dolezal did is culturally appropriative, and suggesting otherwise disrupts actual discussions about transgender identity and issues. (It's also worth noting that a white woman's decade-long deception has effectively hijacked the conversation about race, during a week where the nation was focusing on police brutality in McKinney, Texas.) As Darnell L. Moore of Mic eloquently put it, "In attempting to pass as black, Dolezal falsely represented her identity. Trans people don't lie about their gender identities — they express their gender according to categories that reflect who they are." Racial divisions may ultimately be a construct, Moore notes, but "skin color is hereditary." And it's skin color that primarily determines racial privilege, and the way others in the world interact with your racial identity. Transracial identity is a concept that allows white people to indulge in blackness as a commodity, without having to actually engage with every facet of what being black entails -- discrimination, marginalization, oppression, and so on. It plays into racial stereotypes, and perpetuates the false idea that it is possible to "feel" a race. As a white woman, Dolezal retains her privilege; she can take out the box braids and strip off the self-tanner and navigate the world without the stigma tied to actually being black. Her connection to racial oppression is something she has complete control over, a costume she can put on -- and take off -- as she pleases. While an undergrad at Bellhaven University in Mississipi, the now 37-year-old Dolezal was in Voice of Calvary, a “racial reconciliation community development project where black and whites lived together.” After graduating, she applied to grad school at Howard University, earning a full ride scholarship, as a black woman, after submitting an art portfolio comprised solely of African-American portraits. It was around this time, Dolezal's parents claim, that she began actively presenting herself as a black woman, eventually working her way up to president of the Spokane NAACP in 2014. It seems that at some point, Dolezal's interest and fascination with blackness morphed into fetishization, exotification and actual erasure. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/0...n_7569160.html
Dave Wilson did just that to win a six-year term on the Houston Community College System’s board, misleading voters into believing that he is Black. “I’d always said it was a long shot,” Wilson tells KHOU-TV. “No, I didn’t expect to win.” But he did, and he went to great lengths to do it. Wilson sent out fliers that featured almost exclusively Black people, all of them smiling. On it, he added the call to action: “Please vote for our friend and neighbor Dave Wilson.” Only the faces are not Wilson’s friends or neighbors, but rather just pictures that he stole off of various websites. Another flier proudly announced his endorsement by Ron Wilson, suggesting a Black former state legislator who is well known in the area. Beneath the endorsement announcement, a disclaimer is printed: “Ron Wilson and Dave Wilson are cousins,” it reads. Except the Ron Wilson that Dave Wilson is talking about is not that Ron Wilson, who suffered a stroke in 2009 that left him barely able to speak and may never have heard of Dave Wilson. Dave Wilson does indeed have a cousin named Ron Wilson, and this Ron Wilson did endorse Dave Wilson’s campaign … from Iowa, where he lives. “He’s a nice cousin,” Wilson says, suppressing a laugh. “We played baseball in high school together. And he’s endorsed me.” The plan worked and Wilson beat 24-year incumbent Bruce Austin, who is Black, by just 26 votes. “I don’t think it’s good,” Austin said, adding that the campaign caught him off guard. “I don’t think it’s good for both democracy and the whole concept of fair play. But that was not his intent, apparently.” Austin said he did counter with his own mailers that included Wilson’s face and warned voters that he was a “right-wing hatemonger” who “advocated bringing back chain gangs to clean highways.” He plans to ask for a recount, though there is little chance that the results will change. http://www.diversityinc.com/news/wil...ing-hes-black/
Rachel Dolezal, the embattled president of Spokane's NAACP chapter, is facing more allegations, now from her adopted brother. "She took me aside and just told me not to blow her cover," Ezra Dolezal, one of her African American adopted siblings, told CBS affiliate KREM-TV by phone. "She's like trying to say like people were racist to her her entire life, even though she grew up a white, privileged person up in Montana." Rachel Dolezal CBS NEWS Dolezal has been at the center of a firestorm ever since her parents came forward last week and said she is lying about being African American. She abruptly canceled a Monday meeting where she planned to explain herself, reports CBS News correspondent John Blackstone. Her parents, Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal,remember their daughter as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl. "I am her birth father, I will always be her birth father. And so her true birth ethnicity is Caucasian," Larry said. "Our daughter is primarily German and Czech and European descent," Ruthanne said. Dolezal is the subject of multiple investigations, and some members of her chapter are demanding she step aside. However, Dolezal said she has not misled anyone about her race. "If I was asked, I would definitely say, that yes, I do consider myself to be black," she said. But the city council is now exploring whether she should be removed as chairwoman of a commission that oversees misconduct complaints against police officers.
Maybe it is her way of de-emphasizing, and rejecting the whole idea of her White privilege, and not wanting to be a contributing member, or associating with it at all? Maybe it is the only way she believes she can truly feel what being Black is really like, and the disadvantages that come along with it (kind of like a person who puts on a fat suit), which makes her even more committed in her work? Just being in a relationship with a Black man and being around Black people, did not fulfill that burning desire to understand?
John Howard Griffin of Black Like Me fame did it before her and his social experiment almost got him killed on several occasions. Now if she really wanted to temporarily experience what it is to be black in America. It would help if she was not pretending to be "high yellow damn near white" but a very dark sister and move down south like say Alabama or Louisiana.....then maybe she would get a taste of being black in a racist space.
ne day in 1964 John Howard Griffin, a 44-year-old Texan journalist and novelist, was standing by the side of the road in Mississippi with a flat tyre. He saw a group of men approaching him. Griffin assumed the men were heading over to assist him but instead they dragged him away from his car and proceeded to beat him violently with chains before leaving him for dead. It took Griffin five months to recover from the assault. The attack was not random; the beating represented a particularly brutal form of literary criticism: Griffin was being punished for having written a book. Black Like Me, the book in question, had been published three years earlier in November 1961 and it had led to its author being both venerated and vilified. Griffin, a lantern-jawed and chestnut-haired white man, deliberately darkened his skin and spent six weeks travelling through the harshly segregated southern states of America, revisiting cities he knew intimately, in the guise of a black man. On the opening page Griffin set out the question he was attempting to answer: "What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin colour, something over which one has no control?" No white man could, he reasoned, truly understand what it was like to be black, because black people would never tell the truth to outsiders. "The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us was to become a Negro," Griffin writes. "I decided I would do this." http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/27/black-like-me-john-howard-griffin
Maybe it is her way of de-emphasizing, and rejecting the whole idea of her White privilege, and not wanting to be a contributing member, or associating with it at all? Maybe it is the only way she believes she can truly feel what being Black is really like, and the disadvantages that come along with it (kind of like a person who puts on a fat suit), which makes her even more committed in her work? Just being in a relationship with a Black man and being around Black people, did not fulfill that burning desire to understand?
But she had sued Howard U for racial discrimination because she is white.
Rachel Dolezal, 37, who headed the NAACP’s Spokane, Washington chapter, sued Howard for discrimination in 2002, the year she graduated from the historically black college with a Master of Fine Arts degree.Dolezal, then known as Rachel Moore, named the university and Professor Alfred Smith as defendants in a lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C.’s Superior Court. During the pendency of the civil case, Smith was chairman of Howard’s Department of Art.
According to a Court of Appeals opinion, Dolezal's lawsuit “claimed discrimination based on race, pregnancy, family responsibilities and gender.” She alleged that Smith and other school officials improperly blocked her appointment to a teaching assistant post, rejected her application for a post-graduate instructorship, and denied her scholarship aid while she was a student.
John Howard Griffin of Black Like Me fame did it before her and his social experiment almost got him killed on several occasions. Now if she really wanted to temporarily experience what it is to be black in America. It would help if she was not pretending to be "high yellow damn near white" but a very dark sister and move down south like say Alabama or Louisiana.....then maybe she would get a taste of being black in a racist space.
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the error in ur statement is saying she needs 'to go South to get a taste of being black in a racist space'..heck know...i have studied n lived below the Mason Dixie line since i come farrin...i found the most racist n ignorant people in Corporate America in NEW YORK....i was taken aback wen the VICE PRESIDENT of Operations for an International company i was working for n with said to me that working around black people especially men made her uncomfortable...she and her consort made this black male's life at the company hell n this was late 1990's...he was a darker hue than me n along the 'u not like them' she somehow felt she would be safe opining as such to moi...i left her dumbfounded and corrected after the comment and all the time i worked with her....she was put out to find that in trying to assuage her guilt n try similar tactics wid me to get me to leave didn't work....to the extent that i wrote a rebuttal to an attempt on her part to fabricate some rot in her evaluation of me...i sat at my computer n wrote said rebuttal n when it hit HR the comments were that i HAD HAD TO HAVE SOUGHT LEGAL COUNSEL IN COMPOSING THE DOCUMENT ..SUCH WAS THE LANGUAGE I USED...I SHUT HER DOWN N SHUT HER UP....also,poor thing didn't realize that I had been in the habit of sharing my morning brew of Blue Mtn coffee with the CEO as both of us were usually the first arrivals in the office..he would come down n have coffee with me...n of course we would chat...at a meeting once, he asked my opinion on a particular subject n my terms used n my take were the talk after the meeting across the company...that blond woman was flabbergasted upon till she found it necessary to move on....yes, i would have cops shadow me driving home to my upscale neighbourhood while living in Little Rock but I never once had any white down there show me open n blatant racism n condescension as that woman tried with me....i have always found the statement that New York is the melting pot of America laughable n erroneous...fi real...my take experience
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Another flier proudly announced his endorsement by Ron Wilson, suggesting a Black former state legislator who is well known in the area. Beneath the endorsement announcement, a disclaimer is printed: “Ron Wilson and Dave Wilson are cousins,” it reads. Except the Ron Wilson that Dave Wilson is talking about is not that Ron Wilson, who suffered a stroke in 2009 that left him barely able to speak and may never have heard of Dave Wilson.
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