Lex Anteinternet: Concepts of Race

Well, I simply can't help myself.

Back in November, 2014, I wrote this entry on concepts of race.

Lex Anteinternet: Concepts of Race:    The way that things ought to be, and at that age typically are.  But beyond that, chances are these two young girls are actually of t...

In that I noted that our concepts of race are actually quite phony.  Over time, what's considered a race at one time has changed and the same cultural demographic is not considered a race later on.  The Irish and the Italians, for example, were once actually considered to be another "race", but certainly are not now.

Well, this has come into the news, although not in the more analytical fashion that we addressed it here, due to the story of  Rachel Doleza.  Doleza was working, apparently fairly successfully, for the NAACP and representing herself as black. She isn't.  She isn't genetically anyhow.

In an interview she recently gave, she essentially claims a sort of "blackness" by way of "self identification".

This is a very curious recent development.  People have always self identified as things that they actually are, and which particularly matter to them.  So, for example, people have identified themselves as "Irish Catholics' or "Norwegian Lutherans" as these identifiers reflect a cultural and religious identity that matters to the.  But you can't really identify yourself as something you flat out aren't.  That's delusional.

But it's become interestingly popular, which says something about how phony the culture has become in some ways.  And here Doleza may be doing us a huge favor.

Delusional self identification has become enormously popular of late.  There are authors who will use a self identifier like those noted above when their own personal lives show those connections to be very thin.  Beyond that, I'm fairly certain that the positions of those who have same gender attractions has become such a cause celibre, no matter what you think of it one way or another, that there are those who self identify in that category who actually don't have the attraction.  And now we see men self identifying as the opposite gender, and vice versa, to the extent that they actually seek surgery to cause that appearance.  In northern Europe, that required a person to have to undergo psychological evaluation before such a surgery is performed, but in the US it does not, in spite of the massive level of severe depression associated with the surgeries and the fairly demonstrable examples of a change in the person's views upon receiving the psychological analysis.

This is really an interesting phenomenon in that in an era when things "natural" are celebrated, this is deeply unnatural. People who are supposedly unhappy with their gender still have the DNA that they were born with, and that's their natural gender.

Race is trickier, as in actually the genetic differences between "races" don't even exist in some circumstances and are purely cosmetic where they do. Race is more of a cultural identifier than anything else, but you can't really run around claiming an cultural identifier that's phony.  Can't be done.

And it's pretty darned insulting too.  Here, ironically, things were once so bad for American blacks that light skinned American blacks would sometimes attempt to pass for "white".  Those days are thankfully over.  But it sure doesn't do current blacks any favors when people run around trying to falsely claim that identifier.