After Rachel Dolezal resigned as chairperson of Spokane’s NAACP chapter, a job roughly equivalent to that of the head of the Harlem’s division of the North American Country Line Dancing Association, it spurned many conversations about race and gender identity.
The consensus I got was that gender and race are both a “Construct” meaning they’re just labels placed on people.
The term “Consruct” can easily be avoided by simply looking in a mirror and acknowledging that some people have darker skin than others and roughly half the population have different things between their legs which their DNA sometimes screws them over on. That has zero relation to your dad being in jail.
Race, scientifically, isn’t a real thing. Certain traits are present across the board. It would be hard to argue that sex isn’t either, yet people are doing it. Constantly.
One of my black friends explained to me how race isn’t real while referring to his struggles as a black man repeatedly over the course of the conversation.
Rachel Dolezal also sees race as a theory, which confuses me since she checked multiple boxes on a job application claiming to be African American and Native American, and is the head of the National Association For The Advancement Of Colored People.
I’m not sure what color they’re referring to but I think it starts with a black.
On a side note it might be time to part with the offensive terminology.
It’s called the African American Studies department. Not the Colored Folk Stuff office.
If race isn’t real then why are you blatantly identifying as a certain race?
Similarly, if gender is a construct why place so much importance on being labeled a certain sex? Afterall, it’s the same constructs at work which force the distinctions to be made.
Without construct there are no labels, and vice versa.
So why play into it if you’re Rachel Dolezal, or for example, Caitlyn Jenner?
I see the following key differences between them:
1) They both have personality disorders. 2) They both own a lot of MAC makeup. 3) In subverting traditional gender and race labels, Jenner altered her physiology by taking hormone replacements, where as no such treatment would be necessary for someone transitioning towards a different race.
Race isn’t a thing, but should certainly be specified on a department directory of your third tier university.
The hilarious part is the people who are on board with the struggle of the trans and black communities seem to have a dog in the fight about which transition is more valid than the other.
What’s the difference between wearing what some might see as a racially offensive Halloween costume 24/7, and cutting your face and wearing a dress or constructing a makeshift vagina out of your penis?
Why walk around saying race or gender is just a societal construct and then insisting you be referred to as one of the labels which you supposedly don’t think have any useful merit, such as Black or Woman?
Why deride the necessity of certain words and explicitly use them?
It’s like they hold you down and prop you up at the same time.
Their explanation is, society doesn’t get it yet, and we’re working towards acceptance, at which point we will start using less words.
Mine is, get over yourselves.
Both of these people are making physical changes to their faces to conform to a constructed identity norm which they claim to in fact see as being somewhere ethereal and antiquated.
It makes no sense.
I’d say this ultimately benefits the right wing, because their entire cause is stripping protections from anyone not at their stockholder’s meeting.
Plus they run the makeup industry.
They’ve been going about it the wrong way.
It you can’t beat them join them.
Labels or no labels.
Not both.
Pass the eyeliner.