The book tour Rachel Dolezal set out on recently has wound up taking her further than I might have imagined. In fact, she made it all the way to South Africa at the invitation of one Clyde Ramalaine, a former priest who now refers to himself as a “bishop” but actually runs a communications company. Her appearance didn’t go off without a hitch, however, Many of the black, South African students in attendance were, shall we say, a bit less than receptive. (Daily Mail)

Deriding Ms Dolezal’s claim to ‘racial fludity’, she was told by a member of the mostly-black audience of students that , ‘Only a white person could claim blackness and tour the world talking to blacks about blackness.’

Another attendee demanded to know, ‘What are your daily experiences as a black person? Is it wearing braids, what is it? …

‘She is just sick or a fraud. Can you imagine a black person from Africa being given a visa and this special treatment to go to America or to London claiming to be white and having the red carpet rolled out for them?

‘This is just another example of white supremacy, why must we have to listen to her?’

There’s more of that but it just gets uncomfortable fairly quickly. I’ll confess that I actually felt rather sorry for her. But if we learned anything from this trip, it’s that the same arguments which took place in the United States when Dolezal was first exposed as a Caucasian were being made in Africa. The aforementioned “bishop” who invited her was giving a speech in her defense which looked like it could have been taken straight from a transcript of an MSNBC roundtable.

‘No one accuses Bruce Jenner of living a lie, or calls him a fraud. He is celebrated for his bravery in being truthful about his true identity.

‘Yet Rachel is vilified, is treated as a pariah, accused of lying about who she really was.’

‘She has chosen to self define and that’s her right. Can’t we just live with who she wants to be? I embrace Rachel as she defines herself,’ he insisted.

Psssst… Bishop? You may have missed a memo over there but I think you’re supposed to call him Caitlyn.

You sort of have to forgive him for taking this approach because he’s hardly the first one. Of course, compared to many of us, he has the argument skewed rather sideways. If you wish to assume that Jenner is actually a woman it’s easy enough to begin hurling accusations about how he competed for all of those years as a man. (That’s obviously unfair because female athletes are one group which definitely does experience a gender wage gap compared to their male colleagues.) But by referring to Jenner with a male pronoun it sounds as if you really don’t believe he can be a woman. And if that’s the case, how do you justify turning around and saying that your friend Rachel can simply decide to be black? It just seems to me that you can’t have it both ways, as much as the SJW transgender warriors who decry Dolezal try to do so.

There’s plenty more of the feedback that Dolezal received, both on social media and at her live events, over at the Daily Mail link. Feel free to flip through, but as I said previously… it gets pretty brutal.