#rahcel

3. rant. just do it

some people are so annoying and never reach out to me to make plans. like stop saying you miss me or being so excited when you walk past me on the street if you don’t ever ask me to hang out. um you do have my number haha. i feel like i put so much more energy into others than they do to me. like, hi, can you send me a text asking me how i’m doing every once and a while? i feel like i’m not a priority in anyone’s life and it sucks.

(my life is going pretty well otherwise)

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The thing about race that makes it different than being born transgender, the reason I refuse to accept any of the CRAP Rachel Dolezal has to say about her identity is that the “black identity” she claims to have always felt since childhood, the plights she claims as her own and the struggles she dares to associate herself with are based on NURTURE not nature.

I am fully willing to accept the idea of people not identifying with their genetic ethnicity, or for that matter identifying with one that they are not genetically attached to. An example of this odd scenario is a girl I used to work with a few years ago. She was African American, but would tell you unabashedly that she was Italian. Why?

She was adopted in infancy by an Italian family. She was raised and NURTURED by the Italian culture. By all accounts these people were her real mother and real father, the only ones she’d ever known. Why shouldn’t she identify with the their culture, culture she was raised in her entire life? Even if it doesn’t match her genetic ethnic identity. And this is not to say there is NO “nature” element involved. There are millions of people through out the world just like her, raised in other people’s cultures who love, respect and identify with those cultures, but who still feel connected to their genetic ethnic or racial identity and that’s okay too.

But Rachel Dolezal has neither of these things.

And the one scenario which would somehow begin to justify the outlandishness of her actions: that she was “nurtured” by black culture, that she was raised in or around it, experiencing the genuine struggles and cultural hurdles that are tied with being an African American in the United States - that scenario is not true.

She did not grow up in a culturally black environment, which is not to say she had no exposure to it, but never in her life did she bear the burden of centuries old racism in the U.S; so for her to say that she “identifies” as a black American is unfair to those who have spent their whole lives with that weight on their shoulders.

And she knows this. Because if she didn’t know this, she wouldn’t have lied. She could have done all the same work she did as the white American she truly is. One could argue, as some have, that it may have been harder for her to garner momentum or success as a white woman in her field, but even if that is true, that does not give her the right to do what she did. That does not justify her actions and even more so, it contrasts pretty ironically with the person she claims to be. At the beginning and end of the day, what she is currently, is a white woman who *at best* manipulated her appearance and racial identity to ease the development of her career in civil rights. Claiming to not only be part of the struggle against cultural inequality for black Americans, but also a victim of it; while concurrently exploiting social injustices she claimed to be fighting to end for her own gain.

Or at worst, she’s an thoughtless, insensitive, narcissistic, racist whose perspective on the world is so narrow she lacks the ability to see past the end of her own disavowed European nose and who is so high on her own white privilege she believes studying (albeit extensively) African history and the black experience in the U.S at a historically black college equates to actually EXPERIENCING the black experience in the United States.

This racial misrepresentation is, by the way, only the tip of the iceberg that is Rachel Dolezal’s deception. As an art history major and (from what I can tell) a fairly talented artist herself, she has a website dedicated to selling her own paintings - many of which are blatant copycats of other artists work. She has claimed for years that her brother(s) were her sons and instructed them to help perpetuate  this lie. She has, since before she was renowned for her racial insensitivity, been in a legal battle against her parents over claims that one of her younger siblings was sexually abused by one of her older siblings. The majority of her family claims this is a lie planted and sown by Rachel herself. (I chose not to take a stance on this issue as it is particularly personal and unreasonable to try and make judgments of from the outside). One of her brothers (who she temporarily presented as her son) said in interviews that she told him she “was black now” and that he was to act as if she was and not admit anything to the contrary. 

She claims to identify as a black woman, she claims she always has. Whether or not one likes her, her contribution to civil rights are undeniable, but does that mean that she has sensitivity towards the causes she’s representing?

The arguably “best” explanation anyone has tried to pose is the career move - that she did it for the greater good, because she could not make as much headway as a white woman. But that just makes her a woman who claims to be fighting tirelessly for equality, but was not willing to put in due diligence to gain her own. 

She has no business discussing race anymore, she has been exposed and it is time she go home.