Former NAACP official Rachel Dolezal has a book tour to do which means that she’s back out on the road granting interviews. (Not bad for somebody who was on the verge of being homeless not long ago.) Unfortunately for her that means the same old questions are being dredged up yet again, offering fresh opportunities for everyone to be enraged at her answers. As the Daily Mail reports this week, it didn’t take long for that to happen. During an interview with the BBC yesterday she launched into her theory that she’s really black in a “transracial” sort of way and your race really doesn’t mean anything to begin with because race is a lie.
Dolezal, 39, claimed that ethnicity is not biological and compared being ‘transracial’ to being transgender in an interview with BBC’s Newsnight on Monday.
Following the interview, Twitter users criticized Dolezal’s comments, accusing her of using ‘white privilege’ to make her arguments.
Dolezal, from Spokane, Washington, said in the interview: ‘Gender is understood – we’ve progressed, we’ve evolved to understanding that gender is not binary.’
She added: ‘It’s not even biological. But what strikes me as so odd is that race isn’t biological either.
Pardon me for continuing to find this subject not only fascinating, but hilarious. Dolezal is something of a nightmare for the Social Justice Warrior crowd because the position she is staking out is the exact subject which most of the transgender activists don’t want to talk about. Both gender and race are obviously biological and we have all sorts of markers we can test ourselves for if we have any questions. But while progressives have mostly fallen into line on the unscientific gender question, applying the same standard to race produces howls of discontent. This occasion was no exception.
The crazy part of all of this is that, from a scientific basis, Rachel almost has a point, at least in terms of degree. Race is definitely biological in terms of being encoded in our DNA, but it’s far more subtle and poorly defined than it probably was ten thousand years ago. We’re all mixed up in terms of race and, as I learned when I did that 23 and Me experiment, there’s a great deal you can’t tell without digging into the person’s DNA. Gender, on the other hand, is pretty clear cut except for the small percentage of the population with any of a particular set of aberrations in their 23rd chromosomal pair. Her parents definitely look very much on the Scandinavian end of the scale, but who knows? Has she had a test done? I know I was certainly shocked to find out that I was probably blacker than Rachel Dolezal.
In any event, Rachel is still out there muddying the waters. I don’t know how many books it’s going to sell for her, but if she wanted to keep herself involved in the conversation she’s certainly accomplishing that much.
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