You are reading a single comment by @Oliver Schick and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@Oliver Schick
I've found this case ...
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/13/rachel-dolezal-i-wasnt-identifying-as-black-to-upset-people-i-was-being-me#img-8
... very interesting from the beginning, with all of its conceptual distortions and confusions. This is another good instalment, with 'black' and 'race' being redefined from their traditional meanings, which are really quite clear and arising from which it's not at all surprising that people felt annoyed (although as this is the first widely-publicised case of this kind (I think), it obviously attracted a good deal more attention than if it had been the 45th).
She was clearly exceedingly unhappy as a child and wanted to distance herself from her family as much as possible and was influenced by writers on American racial politics at an impressionable age. Her attempt at distancing herself obviously had to involve finding another family and replacing the mother and father figures she had had up to that point.
All fair enough apart from the fact that she seemingly couldn't just maintain herself in that but had to make the make-believe real. This is clearly a deeply-felt requirement of her compensation for the suffering she undoubtedly endured, and she seems to try to use it out of a desire for an absolute distance from her 'biological' parents (all the while acknowledging rationally who her 'biological' ancestors were). There are also really interesting aspects concerning the concept of adoption and what is seemingly her attempt to be fully 'de-adopted' from them even though she wasn't ever adopted by them.
Anyway, I think that there really isn't a great principled point here, just an individual's rather unusual attempt at compensating for childhood experiences that has caused understandable offence, but she's still not able to defuse it because she insists/has to insist on defences that most people won't understand or have any time for. I do hope that at some point she'll feel as if she can overcome this need and can stop redefining concepts in ways that don't work.
(For the record, I don't like the concepts 'black' and 'white' as applied to people, either, but I wish we could abolish them altogether, as literally they're nonsense. We're not chess pieces.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdcUDErLzM8