So what do y'all think of Rachel Dolezal?

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She's head of the Spokane NAACP even though she is caucasian with less than 1/4 Native American heritage. She has no African heritage. Both parents are white. According to the NAACP, it doesn't matter what a person's heritage is, they can still participate and that's obvious because it would be discrimination on their part to deny her participation. The problem is she fooled people into believing she was mixed race with a black father.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/12/us/washin ... -identity/

Do you think she should be fired because of the deception?

Don't hate on someone thinking and feeling they're in the wrong skin.

Transracial fo life!

(That's my take.)

I can see why people would be upset at the deception because it looks like she is pretending to be black to secure money and a position which is a form of fraud but what if she really truly feels like a black person and wishes she were one and that's her motivation? This would be an entirely different rationale.

I'm doing a summer independent study on different kinds of passing, which is posing as some kind of category that you don't legitimately belong to. The main ones seem to be race passing, class passing, and sexual orientation passing (people pretending they're heterosexual). The reason I'm studying this is because I'm researching autistic people passing as neurotypical. There's an awesome book I'm about to read called Circus of Souls by Dawn Prince Hughes. It's written by an autistic woman and her overarching point seems to be that everyone is a "freak" and is "passing" in one way or another, but that only certain kinds of passing and certain kinds of oddities are given attention.

In the Washington Post article, the first video shows her talking with a picture behind her on her desk of her with her husband and kid. She's young and clearly white in the photo, so it doesn't look like she's covered her trail too well. But the stories she told about her life growing up sounded like something from a Toni Morrison book. Like, if a white person wrote some of things Toni Morrison wrote, would it be okay? There's like a fine line between deeply personal and characterization. Once this lady turned out to have been white since, let's say, she was a teenager, when she might have started "identifying" as black, those stories started to sound offensive.

I mean, like I study autism and I'm interested in autistic people, but what if I decided to "identify" as autistic? That sounds pretty horrible to me.

What she did was wrong, pretending to be black and to have a father who is black.

What ever happened to 'race is a social construct'?

As a resident of the Spokane area, I am quite familiar with Rachel Dolezal. To be sure, this is truly a bizarre turn of events, and will unfortunately spell the end of her career as a civil rights activist. I say "unfortunately," because she had been a leading light for racial equality in the Spokane area, filled with what had appeared to be a genuine passion for her cause. My fear, now, is that racists will pile on this revelation, making it out to be liberal hypocrisy. I will say this, for people wondering why she had posed as a black woman: I suspect she had very much identified with people continuously getting the short end of the stick - in this case, African Americans - to the extent that she felt she had to be one of them. And the truth is, I somehow doubt that a white woman would have been able to achieve what she had locally in the realm of civil rights that a black woman, who had lived the struggle, could. Now, all that promise is gone.

And people shouldn't judge her too harshly for lying if she did good in the community.

Anyone can be an advocate for the oppressed.

(It says more for the state of things if she couldn't do the same if she was "white", incidentally and sadly.)