White NAACP President pretends to be black

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^^^^My above comment about genetic testing looks snarky but actually there's something too it. Upthread (or I guess downthread by now) there is this thread I participated in which is about haplogroup ancestry genetic typing.

http://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=281179

My haplogroup is T2b, a haplogroup I share with Henry Louis Gates who is verifiably black (by looks, I guess). 23andme also informs me I have 0.00% African ancestry (other than the original Homo sapien one I suppose) so I probably share a haplogroup with HL Gates via a white ancestor of his since I have provably no black ancestors.

So in one sense, genetic testing could sort that out. In another sense, genetic testing shows just how looks-and-culture based our concept of race is. The looks come via genes but the genes don't necessarily slot a person into the group they look like or were raised in. As globalization makes multiraciality increasingly common and increasingly hard to slot people into just one group, the concept of looks-based racial categorizing may disappear for our descendents. If most people in the future wind up being Cablinasian (tip of the hat to Tiger Woods), racial categories may just be a quaint artifact of the past in the future.

Mixed people turn out random sometimes, its weird. I remember reading some article about a pair of twins in the UK that are biracial but one looks black and the other looks like a ginger white person. Sometimes features get mixed and matched, sometimes its a happy medium between the two parents and sometimes it isn't. Barack's father was from Kenya, there was not much mixing going on in that bloodline whereas most African Americans descended who are descended from slaves have something like 30% European blood(some more, some less obviously) and there is also significant Native American admixture so I imagine Benjamin Jealous' mother was already pretty light skinned and so on and so forth. Its kind of funny since I imagine actual black Africans wouldn't consider a lot of African Americans to be really be black in their country but in the US if you appear anything less than 100% white then you aren't considered it. Mexicans are mostly European in blood, some mixed with more indigenous blood than others(northern Mexico is mostly European, the middle is meztizo, and the south is native). but in America they're all considered non-white and part of some made up race callled Hispanics.

Speaking as one from the Spokane area, Rachel Dolezel is well known to me. This is really unfortunate, as she had been a tireless worker for racial equality. I can only imagine that she so identified with people who had faced a history of oppression that she chose to fabricate a whole new life as a black woman. So far, my daughter's Godfather, who is himself an LGBT activist locally, has told me that he's feeling a combination of sympathy, pity, and a sense of betrayal, as he's defended her in the past. Though I understand that many in the local NAACP are throwing their support behind her, as she does in fact have an outstanding record of social activism. More troubling, perhaps, are her claims that she had been sent hate mail anonymously - in fact, the local SPD have since ceased all investigation into the matter, implying that she had been responsible for this hate mail, herself. If so, then one could make a realistic argument for either mental illness, or a personality disorder are responsible for her actions.
It's all very sad that her career had to take such a devastating turn, and ultimately, it's all her own fault.

I'll be completely honest; I really don't care about her personally, in my mind, if she's an effective advocate who's done good work, I don't really care that she may be a bit delusional, but the opportunity to catch the social justice brigade in some extreme, even for them, hypocrisy is pretty hard to resist. I think Jacoby beat me to it, it's pretty ironic when the forces of tolerance™ and the most extreme racists seem to share the same foundational belief.

Your opinion. Not fact.

He looks black to me. If you're judging him as "white" based on skin tone alone, then you're taking the word too literally.

She has just resigned her NAACP position today.

She will be forgotten by next week.

She has other plans. She will go onto other things.

Here in the Spokane area, she'll be in our heads for a long time, I think.

Why does it matter if a member of the NAACP is white?

She shouldn't have lied about it, though, if she lied.

If she's white, she's white. I'm white--and I believe in the agenda of the NAACP. I don't think there's an exclusionary cause preventing whites from joining the NAACP. I'm not sure....but wasn't one of the founders white?

Check out this strange twist!

Rachel Dolezal sued Howard for racial discrimination. Because she was white.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grad ... was-white/

It's sad this is happening to her since she has a black husband and was pregnant with his baby. Not like she is just trying to gain for the sake of gaining. She has black family members!

The NAACP issued a statement saying that the work of white people has always been crucial to their success.

This controversy makes little sense, less than the Christians who got enraged at the Taliban for destroying those ancient Buddha statues. Most Buddhists, I think, viewed the event as a teachable moment for one of their central tenets impermanence. Before the Greeks took up Buddhism and indulged their love of sculpture, images of the Buddha consisted of an empty silhouette of a man.

That involved a world heritage site, so everyone has a claim on it's preservation. This shouldn't matter to anyone besides the NAACP, and they don't seem bothered a bit.

Just from her experience at Howard U as a white woman in a black world - she has an idea of what it's like for a black woman in a white world.

Good point. Part of the reason I probably couldn't pass for black is my lack of experience. People make fun of the black dialect, but they're ignorant about linguistics. It has strict rules, just like any language. Interestingly, it appears that using aks for ask extends back to West African languages that lack the sk diphthong.

There's an interesting author lecture about passing that I heard on BookTV. It's an underresearched topic, particularly in the case of whites passing as black.

I say "aks" for ask, too. I speak in New York dialect.

When I was growing up, my father constantly tried to get me to make the "s" sound in "ask." Just couldn't do it for a long time.

I could do it now, if I'm thinking.

Indeed, African-American Vernacular English has strict rules of syntax and verb conjugation.

Kinda reminds me of the time Jeb Bush tried to claim he was Latino, because his wife is.