Rachel Dolezal’s trans-racial shtick didn’t play very well in South Africa

Hot Air ^ | April 22, 2017 | Jazz Shaw

[2ndDivisionVet]

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.

[Boomer]

Are Navy Radiomen having to learn a new black dialect to communicate across the airwaves or something.

I once knew this big guy who was the brother of the girl I was dating at the time who would go off for 3-5 months (he always came back injured) to play Sports Arena football; one level below pro and the pro scouts would get players from those teams all the time. Anyway every time he came back he talked just like a black guy. I guess the culture is so ebonic in those ball clubs he just got caught up in it.

I asked him why he didn’t turn it off when he got home and I got the impression he didn’t even realize he was doing it. Maybe he was another one who wanted to be a black person deep down. Different for sure.

[ROCKLOBSTER]

No one accuses Bruce Jenner of living a lie, or calls him a fraud.

Bruce Gender is a fraud...he's living a lie.

[Daffynition]

I composed 3 replies to your post last night; don’t know what happened to them [key twilight music]. Sorry.

FWIW, if you listen to the accents [dialect] of WF Buckley, Jr, Julia Child, Eleanor Roosevelt, Katherine Hepburn you’ll see some speech *affect*.

After 33 years of teaching in the *hood*, I could *ebonic* with the best of them; If you are immersed in an accent, you may like your acquaintance, reflect that influence. Having been away from the black-speak for so long, I wouldn’t be able to do it if I tried. :)

If I’ve been on vacay in the South, when I come home, I’ll be saying *ma’am and sir* to everyone. ;)

George Carlin had an incredible monologue about regional accents. It was brilliant.

[Boomer]

I spent many years of my early childhood in Mississippi. I don’t have a Southern accent now but if I lived in the deep South again it would come back like it never left. Like any language I guess; learned early it stays with us for life.

I wish my parents had known that. If they had I’d be speaking up to four languages today. Italian, Sicilian, Spanish (because it’s close enough to Italian), and of course English.

I did understand my friend’s tendency to speak ebonics for a while after coming back from the mostly black football league but figured he needed a reminder he was no longer there and not black. It didn’t take long for him to start speaking normally again.