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[Reelya]

I wonder how they did it. Pretending to have skin of different color must be rather difficult. Especially if you are a university professor and have to teach some people in person.

The take advantage of the fact that many black people have mixed heritage, so some will have fairly light skin. It's not like African American studies have paint-chips and if you're not darker than the paint chip then you're kicked out, it's about ancestry. "black = skin color" is being overly reductionist, for example an albino African American is still an African American hence "black" sociologically, and not a "white person" despite being whiter than anyone.

The main way white women pass off as African American is with frizzy hair and/or a tan.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/06/naacp-leader-accused-of-pretending-to-be-black.html

Rachel Dolezal, the head of Spokane, Washington’s NAACP chapter and an Africana studies professor at Eastern Washington University, is under investigation after her own parents publicly alleged that she has been “disguising herself” as black for many years.
...
Dolezal identified herself as being white, black, and American Indian on her application to the Office of Police Ombudsman Commission, and KXLY4 reports that Spokane is investigating to see if that claim violated any city policies.
...
Ruthanne Dolezal told The Spokesman-Review that her daughter started portraying herself as black in 2006 or 2007, when the family adopted four African-American children. She accused Rachel of passing off her adopted brother Izaiah as her son, and fabricating many wild details about her upbringing, including that she was born in a tepee in Montana and had to hunt for her food with a bow and arrows.

I mean ... what? That last bit. It's not even trying. It's like the level of lies you tell when you're five years old. Yet this other lady made a whole career out of this.

[dragdeler]

-

[Reelya]

There's a biological basis for transgender however*. Transblack isn't a thing.

EDIT: I'll also point out that the biological basis of transgender people proves both extremes wrong: both the gender essentialists who hold that chromasomes dictate everything and the blank-slate people who believe everything is a social construct. The mere existence of transgender people throws a spanner in the works of that idea. See the story about the kid who they accidentally castrated during circumcision, so the doctors convinced the parents to turn baby into a girl. It didn't end well and the kid found out, transitioned to male then killed himself. If gender was just a social construct, that shit wouldn't have happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money

[Loud Whispers]

“To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness,” she said.

She tripled dipped the blackness. Fug man you don't have to pretend to be it to appreciate it, Bruno Mars done it just fine

Krug said lying about her identity was “the very epitome of violence, of thievery and appropriation, of the myriad ways in which non-Black people continue to use and abuse Black identities and cultures.” She also linked it to mental health issues from when she was young.

“The mental health professionals from whom I have been so belatedly seeking help assure me that this is a common response to some of the severe trauma that marked my early childhood and teen years,” she said.
In the Medium post, Krug also referred to herself as a “culture leech” and a “coward” for not coming forward sooner.

Ah shit, now I just feel bad for her. Honestly seems like she had some issues and this was her way of coping, probably could've come forward in a much less embarrassing way if she hadn't spun so public a web of lies. Seems different to Dolezal too, in that Krug is actually sorry and went public with her misdeed, whereas Dolezal had to be kicked out of the lie and only seemed sorry to be caught, claiming transraciality

[Reelya]

Read further down. He colleagues don't believe the confession. She only made that after she was outed, so she's done this to get ahead of the news. She's probably seen what happened to similar cases where they doubled down, so she's exposed herself with the "pity me" angle.

Friends and colleagues have been shocked by the news, with Hari Ziyad saying the professor only confessed after she was caught.

“She didn’t do it out of benevolence,” Ziyad tweeted. “She did it because she had been found out.”

Dr Yomaira Figueroa, an associate professor at Michigan State University, agreed.

“Krug got ahead of the story because she was caught & she knew the clock was ticking before folks started to confront her & ask questions,” Figeuroa wrote.

“Do not believe for one second that she would have come out with the truth on her own.”

Yarimar Bonilla, a political anthropologist and professor at Hunter College said she always felt “something was off with her.”

“See, not only did she try to “pass” (we need a better term here - masquerade?) as Latina from “El Barrio” but she also told us her parents were addicts and even said that there were overdoses and suicide attempts happening during the fellowship period,” she tweeted.

“She always dressed/acted inappropriately—she’d show up to a 10am scholars’ seminar dressed for a salsa club etc—but was so over the top strident and “woker-than-thou” that I felt like I was trafficking in respectability politics when I cringed at her MINSTREL SHOW.”

[Loud Whispers]

Read further down. He colleagues don't believe the confession. She only made that after she was outed, so she's done this to get ahead of the news. She's probably seen what happened to similar cases where they doubled down, so she's exposed herself with the "pity me" angle.

I can't wait for the inevitable biopic series about her life, the whole thing sounds like the kind of satire you'd find from a 90s British trash satire

“She always dressed/acted inappropriately—she’d show up to a 10am scholars’ seminar dressed for a salsa club etc—but was so over the top strident and “woker-than-thou” that I felt like I was trafficking in respectability politics when I cringed at her MINSTREL SHOW.”

Ok this is inappropriately hilarious

[Reelya]

I can't wait for the inevitable biopic series about her life, the whole thing sounds like the kind of satire you'd find from a 90s British trash satire

Ack. Don't speak too soon. Right now I found out that there's a Netflix thing called The Rachel Divide about Rachel Dolezal the other white lady who faked her way into running an NAACP chapter.

[Rolan7]

There's a biological basis for transgender however*. Transblack isn't a thing.

EDIT: I'll also point out that the biological basis of transgender people proves both extremes wrong: both the gender essentialists who hold that chromasomes dictate everything and the blank-slate people who believe everything is a social construct. The mere existence of transgender people throws a spanner in the works of that idea. See the story about the kid who they accidentally castrated during circumcision, so the doctors convinced the parents to turn baby into a girl. It didn't end well and the kid found out, transitioned to male then killed himself. If gender was just a social construct, that shit wouldn't have happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money

Yeah, I was something of a gender abolitionist until I met trans people and realized I was dismissing something very important (also projecting).  I'm very skeptical about any sort of physiological test for gender but there does seem to be a physiological component, at least for some people.  My takeaway is that it's all the more important to let people explore and choose their own gender expression.

[Loud Whispers]

Ack. Don't speak too soon. Right now I found out that there's a Netflix thing called The Rachel Divide about Rachel Dolezal the other white lady who faked her way into running an NAACP chapter.

Does it count as a monkey's paw wish if you knew the wish would be grim, fell and terrible?

[TD1]

There's a biological basis for transgender however*. Transblack isn't a thing.

Wait, I'm confused. What's the difference between transracial and transgender?

My perspective is that both appropriate the social norms surrounding certain physical characteristics. Namely, genitalia and racial markers (ie skin colour). Why would you say one 'is a thing' while another isn't?

[Yoink]

One is 'PC' and the other isn't. Don't bother even trying to make sense of it beyond that.   
That way lies madness.   

[Akura]

Got a service award from work for being there 5 years. Could have sworn I've been there for 6, but, eh.

I expected some shitty certificate. They actually gave me a vinyl record. One side is likely unplayable because of a some cheap stickers they put on the grooves. The other has a label indicating the record used to belong to the Musical Heritage Society(and a copyright date of 1980). Somehow, I get the idea that someone at my company literally stole a vinyl record from the library, defaced it, and used it as an award certificate.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

There's no such thing as a racial marker - race is completely arbitrary. That's why you occasionally get cases of people pretending to be black, because "being black" is a fluid category and as such people who are white fakers can look very similar to people who are black but light-skinned.

A good example of this is the difference between racial categories in the US and those in South Africa, as exemplified in the opening scene of Gandhi (1982).

In the US, anybody with recent black ancestors can claim to be black, with various degrees of force on the "can" depending on what year you're looking at. Conversely, in South Africa you have a situation where not only does it not match this US definition, but black and white people in SA also have different perspectives - SA has the category of "coloured" for people with both white and black ancestors, with only people without recent white ancestors being "black". And also on the train you see the racists going back and forth calling Gandhi either black or colored because he doesn't quite fit in the SA racial order at all (my understanding is that this eventually lead apartheid SA to separately define the races as white, black, coloured, and Indian - just those, no other categories).

You might also look at the outdated US racial category of "yellow", not for Asian people but for black people so light skinned they could sometimes pass as white and avoid certain legal restrictions (this term is offensive if extremely archaic now, so don't use it).

People don't know they're black, white, or anything else until they get socialized as such - they know people have different appearances, but as per above people with different appearances can get lumped into the same racial category.

In other words, race isn't "internal", we've just got societies full of racists reinforcing it and so it's hard to escape even if you want to, where as if you try to uproot a person's gender be they trans or cis they'll be horribly traumatized - it's a part of their actual self and existence.

Also, trans and enby people are ingrained throughout all of human history, where as race as a distinct idea was gradually invented starting around the late 1600s taking their first step into ideas of biology.

[Frumple]

Got a service award from work for being there 5 years. Could have sworn I've been there for 6, but, eh.

I expected some shitty certificate. They actually gave me a vinyl record. One side is likely unplayable because of a some cheap stickers they put on the grooves. The other has a label indicating the record used to belong to the Musical Heritage Society(and a copyright date of 1980). Somehow, I get the idea that someone at my company literally stole a vinyl record from the library, defaced it, and used it as an award certificate.

Eh... may have not been stolen even it was in a library at some point, for what it's worth. Libraries don't keep everything around, generally. 40 year old vinyls are exactly one of the things that would be offloaded to make space for other stuff their patrons might actually use.

That said, the Musical Heritage Society's just a mail order record label. Unless the record was donated to a library somewhere in between, it was probably ordered or picked up cheap somewhere or another.

... so do you even have a vinyl record player, or...?

[Akura]

... so do you even have a vinyl record player, or...?

I might? I don't actually know.