Quote: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?

 

One of the resident race experts at MSNBC has already chimed in on this, coining the phrase "trans-black." 

 

I think it goes without saying that at a minimum, Dolezal is indeed a pathological liar, and potentially just completely nuts.  She comes across as an attention starved psycopath who needs some sort of controversy in her life to get in front of cameras.  The whole incident that started this with her reporting threats being mailed to her through the NAACP PO box sounded fishy from the start, especially after the USPS investigated and determined there was no way these arrived in the mail, and had to be put in the box by someone with a key.  Look at her history of past complaints, and how she seems to have controversy following her throughout her life.  Add to that the fact that her brother is another one who is having his own issues with molesting minors in his own family, and this whole story just gets crazier by the day.  It's certainly given her a great opportunity to make the media rounds.  NBC has had her on pretty much every news program they can think of to do interviews, so she's getting the attention she craves.  I'm sure it's only a matter of time before she's suing them for Matt Lauer allegedly attempting to fondle her during the interview. 

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