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Faceplams: Seems you've been reading up on this theory: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015...ption-science/Originally Posted by telee.kom
Active Member
Seems you've been reading up on this theory: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015...ption-science/
God is an American
Wrong. MLK had relatives who survived slavery. He was born into a culture that denied his personhood on the understanding that black people had no place in white society. People today are still born into black and white categories in a prejudiced society, which still grants privileges to white families who have benefited from access to these privileges for generation after generation. Is that clear enough? Good, because in order for a white person to use their privileged position granted by this system and pretend they're black and move in a culture that is not theirs, it is a prerequisite that they pretend all that history is irrelevant to their performance of a black person.
This is a deeply tragic denial of historical realities. The white person's desire to "move on" is at heart a wish to forget their deeply rooted advantages, granted by their family's privileged place in a racist society. To forget all that and deny that anyone else around them has a different experience of racism would be truly "colourblind". We don't have that society; we are not starting from zero.
Comparing the homosexual community, who lived through and continue to experience the denial of equal rights, to one white person who blacked up and got called out for it is insane. You have to stop arguing from soundbites.
Cisgender as a term was coined to describe a real phenomenon — people who experience the privilege of normative gender roles assigned to them at birth. Many people don't understand this because their socialized understanding of gender roles is confused with a biological understanding of sex characteristics. Whereas "cisrace" is just a nutty post-hoc justification for inappropriate behaviour. A trans person doesn’t have the option to stop performing gender. A white person in blackface gets to take off the makeup and go home to their white privilege.
Last edited by botley; 06-13-2015 at 09:36 AM.
Active Member
No shit. That's the point. History didn't magically vanish when he wished for a future either. Your only angle is "only black people can say that" and it's just ridiculous.
She's the head of Spokane's NAACP.
You are making the exact same justification that people made about the patriarchy to attack transgender. It's very much like people using religious history to attack homosexuality. Hell, you are even using the "that person's individual choice of identity hurts mine." It doesn't matter how much history exists. It doesn't make something vanish.
Also, transrace and cisrace aren't inventions for a single person. It existed long before this story. Your entire rant comes tumbling down even more when it involves any other cisrace.
Active Member
Here let me just swap something out in what you just said: "A man in drag gets to take off his makeup and go home to the patriarchy"
Now do one of those bigoted rants about white people being evil with a black person who identifies as white. Perhaps you could tell us how they don't REALLY identifiy as white and it's really just some lie they use due to an underlying problem. That would be such a new and refreshing claim. /s
God is an American
I don't need to... in order for a black person to "identify as white" they would need to pass for white in prejudiced society. Which is all but impossible, not because white people are evil, but because our society systematically favours people born to white families. If you have the ability to pass for the dominant race in a racist society you do it only to survive, not because you FEEL like that race.
Incorrect, he was demanding a space for his family, and families that looked like his, so they would be regarded as persons in a racist culture that denied this. He wasn't wishing for people to be able to traipse back and forth between cultures as if the very real distinctions society drew between them didn't matter. No white person could possibly have occupied his position of leadership in the black community. Your comparison here is just plain false.
What? Where did I say that? I am not defending history, I am pointing out how it still has an impact on us today. Here's where you are most tragically mistaken:
What you seem to have misunderstood or are confused by is that pointing to historical inequity isn't the same as perpetuating one in the present day. You don't get to pick and choose what parts of history you benefit from. You either benefit from it, or not. If you benefit from racial prejudice, and pretend to belong to a group that does not, you are lying and misrepresenting your background.
Yes, that's right, he does. Putting on clothes doesn't remove patriarchal privilege, any more than makeup removes racial privilege. When a trans person identifies with a gender role which differs from what they were raised in, it is to express a gender that reflects who they are. This distinction completely falls apart with race, because racial background is historically motivated entirely by birthright; you can't pick and choose what part of history you occupy, it's something established by the family you were born in. You don't get to identify with a race of your choosing.
We're talking about a behaviour, here. Transrace applies specifically to people who are adopted into a family of a different racial background, not to people who attempt to perform a racial profile different from their birth family's. To put someone like Rachel Dolezal in a separate category from "cisrace" is just racial prejudice under a new guise. Again, a black person can't possibly wake up one day and start calling themselves white to get the same treatment as white people. "Cis" is a prefix pointing to the performative nature of gender, because it's based on the theory that all gender roles are performed. Race is something that society performs, not individuals.
Last edited by botley; 06-13-2015 at 12:04 PM.
Active Member
your identity does NOT have to be dependent on your outward ability to pass. Also, it's definitely not "impossible" to pass as white when you are black. It's also somewhat common in mixed race individuals (which is exactly what Dolezal is claiming).
Dolezal also grew up with black siblings, who were astranged from their shitty over religious parents. Sounds like Dolezal was too.
Ah there it is. The "they dont really IDENTIFY as something other than how they were born, there is an alterior motive!" angle. We can file that right next to Huckabee's "so I can shower with girls" comment.
Actually, they are BOTH a combination of genetics. This is quite obvious in the situation of mixed genetics.
"You can't pick and choose which gender you occupy, it's something established by how you were born. You don't get to identify with a gender of your choosing"
ah, back to the alterior motive angle again. "Transsexuals are clearly only doing it to gain the same societal treatment as their chosen gender" ...and that shit is working sooo well! /s
Just like gender norms are separate from gender identity, so too is race norms and race identity.
"Gender is something that society performs, not individuals. This is why feminism fighting against societal gender norms are fundamentally at odds with transsexuals."
Last edited by DigitalChaos; 06-13-2015 at 02:11 PM.
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I'd like to point out that there has been a lack of "Orange is the new black" jokes
God is an American
And a lack of reading comprehension, clearly
Active Member
Different "races" of humans are simply genetic variances. I wouldn't be surprised if science, in the future, allowed some of those genes to be altered. For now, people have to rely on superficial mechanisms. The ability to alter your gender beyond just superficial means is a fairly recent invention. It in no way lessens the "realness" of transgender people who lived before that time.
Active Member
says the guy endlessly conflating race and ethnicity
Throbbing Member
I'm somewhat baffled as to why this is even remotely newsworthy.
Active Member
If she wasn't a NAACP leader, nobody would give a shit. Remember when Elizabeth Warren got heat for having a decade under her belt of claiming to be a minority? I think it was during the 2012 season and it was called into question because she may have used it for advancement... But it's kinda weird regardless.
Bite me
While studying American slave literature, racial history, racial studies and post-colonial and ethnic literary criticism in college while obtaining my BA in English Literature, we had to read (among many other things, including of course W.E.B. Dubois and Ralph Ellison) Mark Twain's THE TRAGEDY OF PUDD'NHEAD WILSON. Highly recommended. See also THIS OPINION PIECE.
Last edited by allegro; 06-14-2015 at 10:48 PM.
Throbbing Member
I take this as real life onion article, it gave me a good chuckle. What is baffling to me how some people take this so seriously
Bite me
Because she's a goofball and black people don't think it's very funny.
Edit: Whoa, she's just nuts.
Meanwhile, she resigned.
Last edited by allegro; 06-15-2015 at 08:25 PM.
Administrator
Bite me
whoa, holy shit
Throbbing Member
Exactly, she's just bonkers. Her parents selling her out gives it a good angle. Not newsworthy.
Active Member
This is awesome.
Sounds like she REALLY liked the attention. I can't imagine being in her brother's position. That's one fucked up family.
Bite me
Totally bonkers:
Dolezal attended Howard University, a historically black school, where, an adopted brother stated, she did not assimilate — but rather had problems fitting in. Her adopted brother Ezra told Buzzfeed News that “she used to tell us that teachers treated her differently than other people and a lot of them acted like they didn’t want her there,” Ezra said. “Because of her work in African-American art, they thought she was a black student during her application, but they ended up with a white person.”
The website The Smoking Gun uncovered late Monday that Dolezal went as far as filing a lawsuit against Howard in 2002.
The lawsuit named the university and professor Alfred Smith — then chairman of Howard’s Department of Art, in which Dolezal was a student — as defendants in the lawsuit. Prior to the suit’s dismissal in 2004, Dolezal’s claims against Howard included “discrimination based on race, pregnancy, family responsibilities and gender.”
The court opinion also noted that Dolezal claimed that the university’s decision to remove some of her artworks from a February 2001 student exhibition was “motivated by a discriminatory purpose to favor African-American students over” her.
Hierba Gatera
Inflammatory headlines by the US propaganda machine. And a bunch of fucking hypocrisy.
Bite me
The Daily Kos??
Hierba Gatera
I was generalizing.
Captain Rustleboots
So the NAACP lady who has been living in blackface for the last upteen years apparently called for the boycot of that Exodus movie a few years back because they casted white people as africans.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/dolez...s-as-africans/
Bite me
(four years)
Captain Rustleboots
I read it as she started her "transition" (lol) in 06/07 with teasing/braiding her hair, and she didn't really go full on blackface until 2011. I stand corrected, she started pretending to be black 8-9 years ago and went off the deep end 4 years ago.
Active Member
I'm really on the fence about that story. On one hand I find it ridiculous, on the other hand the amount of schadenfreude is fucking disturbing.
I understand her situation to a point, and sympathize with her, well, sympathies. I just think she didn't need the deception. Obviously she reached a point where, never having actually said she was black while everyone assumed she was, the simplest course of action was to give in and embrace it. But indeed, as her adoptive brother said, it end up being real life blackface...
But there is way too much glee surrounding that whole story, an easy way to make fun of all SJWs and social activists by associating them with a ridiculous fraud.
Captain Rustleboots
Dude and showing pictures of some random black dude and his kid and saying that was her family? The black community doesn't need people pretending, ally's do just fine. I'm a huge LGBT supporter and I'm not out there pretending to be gay, they don't need me pretending...it undermines both causes. She's nutty as fuck man.
Bite me
She's an idiot, and it's disturbing. Race isn't a biological thing, you can do blood tests and find zero evidence of race, yet she's saying she "identifies as black." If she said she "identifies as African American" and went around wearing corn rows and didn't change her face color, nobody would care, because that's identifying with a culture. But if she colored her face yellow and pulled her hair back really hard so her eyes were slanted and wore kimonos and learned how to do manicures and told everybody that she "identified as Asian" people would be all "WHAT THE FUCK?" She was just getting zero attention being white and just wanted to separate herself out with "otherness."
Active Member
She does seem to have issues. But I don't like how the story's being presented either. There was a lot of glossing over and oversimplification of a situation that seems fairly complicated. Somehow I suspect that over the years, she found herself in a situation she just couldn't handle.
Her relationship with her family is messed up, yet there's no way to know why it is so. Her being looked down for being one of the white kids in a prominently black school (well, according to some reports once again) couldn't have been easy to handle either, especially when it comes from a community that you wholeheartedly support.
I feel like her "white privilege" was the glass wall that kept her from really being part of a culture she admired, and that the only way to shatter that obstacle was to pretend she was born within that culture.
That doesn't make it right in any way, but I don't agree with her being depicted as some sort of racial clown. I just think she fucked up. We all do, we usually are just lucky that our mistakes don't end up being so fucking topical. She managed to fuck up in a way that ties racial stereotypes, social justice activism, trans-anything, white privilege and culture appropriation. It's almost a full bingo card of FUBAR.
Which is why the gleeful horror I see in the articles and comments is equally disturbing to me...
Edit : I see your points though, and I don't disagree, let's be clear on that.
Last edited by Khrz; 06-17-2015 at 12:40 PM.
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