people have pointed towards a psychological imbalance (parental issues etc), or her not belonging to a white community therefore seeking solace in african american ancestry despite immediate family not being african. do you sympathise with her and think that perhaps she identifies better with african americans therefore no harm caused? or do you think that she doesn’t fully understand the struggles that africans have faced and could never truly understand what it means to be african? or something completely different?
A joke, she has no idea what black people have went through or what some ‘colored’ i.e. brown people go through. While she shouldn’t be blasted for her views, its unrealistic for her to ‘‘identify’’ with a race who has been abused for much of its recent history as she can never understand what is it to be black.
We live in interesting times…
But here’s a question. If Rachel had been adopted by African-American parents and had been raised in a majority black community - could she fairly and reasonably say that: she identifies as black? In such a situation, her cultural context would be African/Black experiences.
So this is where I lose sympathy for her. I can almost accept that racial identification blurs with cultural identification, and if the latter is a social construct - then maybe, just maybe there’s something to the idea of being transracial.
But she loses my sympathy when she claims an ancestry and a history that is not hers. If she said she empathizes and that she could relate to it, I’d think she was on to something. But, from the reports, she seems to deny her own history and create a fictional history and ancestry - that is disingenuous.
fair enough, but lets say she grows up seeing discrimination/prejudice against her adoptive parents/community? would she not be in a better position to identify with black people? or does she have to personally experience it to be considered black?
She can but another example, consider the racism Muslims go through in the West, would you say our white best friends would identify the racism muslims suffer like muslims themselves do? They can maybe relate to it better but that’s as far as I would go!
yeah, that’s the thing.. she could say she empathizes on a higher level because of her family history but to identify as black, in a world where black women still have it tough due to being a double minority, seems like she never really understood that if she can easily claim to be african.
Colleague of mine is Jewish and her SIL adopted a child from China and of course the child, now a teen has been raised in the Jewish faith. This little girl is of Chinese racial heritage, but as she was raised Jewish and identifies as such, she also sees herself as having a shared heritage and history with Jewish people. She considers the Holocaust to be a part of her personal history. When I think about it - it makes sense. Why can’t she claim it as part of her heritage?
And that then poses another question - can heritage only be claimed through family connections or can you make another’s history your own because you find it relatable?
i’m not sure what her actual bond or relation is with the history of african americans. the parents didn’t mention that.. or i guess i haven’t read up on it as much. maybe there IS some connection there that she felt at a young age (she did say that even as a child she would draw herself using a brown crayon as opposed to a peach one) but your story seems different in the sense that this child grew up in a jewish home and was taught and began to sympathise more and more about the jewish history. so it’d be interesting to hear of rachel’s childhood and relationship with parents.
Her parents adopted African American children, she went to a predominantly black university, she was married to a African-American man, her son is racially half-African-American.
Personally I think she has a lot of intersections with the African American community and she can definitely empathize. But the question is when does empathy become appropriation or can empathy become identification, without appropriation?
And going back to an earlier point of mine - can she self-identify or does an existing member of a community have to invite her to part of that community?
Empathy, invitation, identification or appropriation?
Well, she is Jewish so she should claim it as part of her heritage. You can’t change your genetic makeup so identifying as another race makes no sense especially if you look 100% mongoloid, have East Asian parents and raised in that culture but you want to identify yourself as part of the Caucasoid race. Um no. If you are a Pashtun or a Kurd and confuse a lot of people because they can’t tell what you are, go ahead and say you are white, black, alien, whatever. The thing we identify someone’s race by looking at them, unless you are a forensics doctor and working with remains of dead people. If you don’t look Negroid and say you are black, people will question you. Same thing goes for transgender people, we can’t read how you feel inside. Unless you get surgeries or makeovers to look like the other gender, you are not that gender in other people’s eyes. You can identify yourself however you want, you can be a unicorn if you want but others will identify you based on what they SEE. This is the whole purpose of identity.
i’m not sure about this. to a certain degree, i get it. like i said.. if people can identify as a gender then surely they should be able to identify as a race.. which puts a whole different spin on identity itself. and if she is doing it out of her experiences with her adopted sibs, her educational background and her african husband then she didn’t just make a whimsical decision to be black.. to a certain extent she could relate and maybe she confused empathy for appropriation. is that such a bad thing? that’s what i’m unsure of. she never disregarded african history, and she did work for NAACP. but there’s a difference in actually experiencing something and empathising for sure.
Following up on background provided in post 14, she lived as a black person. In in other words, as far as those around her were concerned she was black. (As opposed to a white person living as a white person and claiming to have gone thru a black persons struggles).
As for sympathy, she has not asked for anyone’s sympathy.
Clearly living as a black person has no advantages. She wanted to live as a black person. And lived it.
Her parents are scum. To knock her down in public like that. The media are scum. For making this to be about dishonesty.
She wants to live a black life. She is entitled to it.
To those who state she will never understand what blacks went through, she doesn’t claim to. She just wants to live the black persons life. Too much psychoanalysis going on.
