Over the weekend, I've tried to read through and make sense out of this Spokane, Washington gal.....Rachel Dolezal.....the NAACP chapter president in Spokane.....who was born white into a Montana family apparently and they had adopted several black kids as part of the family. Rachel at some point, went off to college and studied black studies.....getting a degree in the area of expertise, and then married a black guy for a couple of years. For five or six years.....she's cut off her family and mostly pretended for the most part....to be completely black (frizzy hair, dark tan, etc). Most folks in Spokane thought she was black, so it's come to them as a bit of a shock.....she's a white gal pretending to be black.
I don't see a big deal with this myself. We have folks who pretend to be religious and they aren't. We have folks who pretend to be Republicans and they aren't. We have folks who pretend to have college degrees and they don't have such degrees. We have folks who pretend to have morals and certainly lack them. We have folks who claim to be such-and-such.....but aren't who they claim to be. We have quarterbacks who pretend to be qualified or capable.....signing mega contracts......then fumble around through a season and demonstrate they aren't quarterbacks. We have news journalists who pretend to know something.....but don't know much of anything. We have bankers who know just about everything except banking. We have mechanics who say they can do a simple brake-job, but can't do the simplest of brake-jobs. And we have think-tank idiots who appear on CNN, but barely can speak to the topic they were brought in.....to chat about.
Course, being the head NAACP person.....means you get a free ticket to the national meeting (wherever they hold the meeting), and you can just imagine this gal flying in, and shaking hands with a hundred black VIPs and they each have some irritation that she's not supposed to be there. Folks will stand around in the hallway.....gossiping on how they can 'fix' this or prevent this from happening in the future. It'll consume half the off-camera action for whole weekend.
As for the family angle? I'm guessing that she just likes being noted as "black" and it's part of some simple gimmick to get noticed. Heck.....there might be a couple thousand folks looking at this.....buying some frizzy hair stuff.....getting a tan, and showing up at their office HR shop to note their properly ethnic status change. Personally.....none of this should matter. But for some odd reason, we've made it matter, which is odd, if you ask me. If I were her parents.....I'd just send her a note and say that we've made the change too.....becoming Mexican or Hispanic and include some picture of everyone in some Mexican-style clothing.
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