Quote:Oh, I've had this conversation with a good friend of mine who happens to be a little higher on the melanin scale than I am.  He too is a very blue blooded black guy, but his reaction was similar.  I understand that most won't embrace her for what she's deluded herself into believing, but there are many who are/will in positions where they can actually express their support from coast to coast.  Ask Whoopie Goldberg.  The problem here is that these luminaries have a real following, so their low information fans will gobble that up and regurgitate it to anyone who is listening, and before you know it, black is just a state of mind.  My friend even conceded that much. 

 

Dolezal was scheduled to meet with her executive board on Monday.  The meeting was abruptly canceled, and she resigned that afternoon.  It's pretty clear how that resignation went. 

I think that what's going on with the Whoopie Goldbergs of the world boils down to simple image control: they can't admit being wrong about something for fear of losing a few fans. Several black leaders, including senior members of the NAACP, came out in Dolezal's defense very quickly during the ten seconds that it looked like this might be a smear campaign. When it got to the point that even Dolezal couldn't deny being born as white as a sheet of printer paper, they couldn't backtrack without admitting that they were hoodwinked by Dolezal and/or didn't wait for facts before jumping on the "if she says she's black, she's black" bandwagon. Because of that, we now have people like Whoopie Goldberg and Raven-Symone feeling all but forced to ride that horse until we all forget about it and they can dodge the topic for the rest of eternity, and the more they say that it's ok to be fake-black without addressing the real problems underlining the situation (like fraud), the more their audience will just assume that the only issue at stake is whether it's ok to live as a black person when you were born white, and they'll continue to parrot support for Rachel Dolezal without caring about the whole story.

 

That's when things get dangerous: when a large group of people is conditioned to listen only to what a few celebrities tell them, and not even bother to turn on even the most liberal news network out there (MSNBC, which generally hasn't made any effort to support Dolezal) and see that, wait, hold on, there's way more to this story. This woman lied about who she is, lied her way to the top of the Spokane NAACP, lied her way into a professorship, lied about her brother being her son, lied about receiving threats and hate mail that she had actually planted herself and is now pushing sexual abuse allegations against her family to get back at them for not supporting her. Whatever your views are on whether it's ok to live as a black person when you were born white, the real meat of this story is that Dolezal is, by all appearances, a pathological liar, and somehow that's getting buried beneath arguably the most superficial question of all: is it ok to identify with a different race?

---