Posted on 06/15/2015 2:56:08 PM PDT by NYer
Langston Hughes looked kindly on racial “passing.” In his essay, Fooling Our White Folks, he describes it as a con at the expense of whites who deserve whatever they get: “Because our American whites are stupid in so many ways, racially speaking, I have great tolerance for persons of color who deliberately set out to fool our white folks.”
Our white folks are very easily fooled. Being so simple about race, why shouldn’t they be? . . . since they are prejudiced, there’s no harm in fooling the devil, is there? . . . Most colored folks think that as long as white folks remain foolish, prejudiced, and racially selfish, they deserve to be fooled. No better for them!
Like the blacks passing as whites defended by Hughes, Rachel Dolezal perpetrated her con largely at the expense of whites. She identified herself as African-American in applying to a police ombudsman position in Spokane, Washington and well-intentioned officials in the overwhelming white city (86.7 percent white with a black population of only 2 percent) were taken in. The same gullibility was in evidence at Eastern Washington University (only 3.2 percent black), where she was made a professor of Africana Studies. Like Hughes' heroes, Dolezal suckered gullible whites.
Of course, she also deceived blacks. There is something astonishingly cynical about using the bureaucratic apparatus of diversity to further one's career by pretending to be a member of minority that has endured centuries of injustice. Despite this fact, there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of her commitment to racial justice. Her advocacy as head of the Spokane NAACP appears to have been entirely in earnest. We may be surprised to encounter a figure like Dolezal, but Langston Hughes would not have been. In his short story “Who’s Passing for Who?” he describes a group of black artists who end up spending an evening with a couple with politics very much like hers:
One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help. Usually, to tell the truth, they have nothing to help with, except their company—which is often appallingly dull.
Dreary as the prospect of an evening with such people is—Hughes calls them “overearnest uplifters”—the visitors do offer to buy drinks and so the cash-strapped bohemians join them. After a cocktail or two, the white couple confesses that they are actually black and have been “passing” for fifteen years. All awkwardness disappears:
Then everybody laughed. And laughed! We almost had hysterics. All at once we dropped our professionally self-conscious “Negro” manners, became natural, ate fish, and talked and kidded freely like colored folks do when there are no white folks around.
But, then, at the story’s end, there is another turn. As the couple pulls away in the cab headed for the whiter, tonier precincts around Central Park, the woman leans out and yells. “Listen boys! I hate to confuse you again. But, to tell you the truth, my husband and I aren't colored at all. We're white. We just thought we'd kid you by passing for colored a little while—just as you said Negroes sometimes pass for white.”
“They had had too much fun at our expense—even if they did pay for the drinks,” the narrator concludes. I don’t know how much fun Rachel Dolezal has had in all this (more than anything, she seems sad) but she probably owes Spokane’s black community a round of drinks. As for the whites whose affirmative-action programs, diversity training sessions, hate crime inquiries, and deep personal cluelessness Dolezal so shamelessly exploited? They had it coming.
GMAFB!!!
I consider this absurd and unworthy of a First Things contributor.
the wrong side won in 1865
Let’s all don black face and post the pictures here as a tribute to Rachel.
Somebody...PLEASE...
ANYBODY...please call Racheal “NIGGER!”
Now, today and at your first opportunity.
Good-NESS...make her respond to the epithet of NIGGER...now...today.
I was born a poor black child.
Is this dumb ass doing a remake of the jerk?
Sorry, bub, but the whites that you fool are special...they are liberals.
Those of us with real jobs and real experience know exactly what you...and they...are.
Thankfully, we also know honest, moral, and intelligent blacks.
Obviously, you and your ilk are not in that group.
There is only one way out of this for Rachel.
Change her name to Tyrese and become a black man.
But overt racism against blacks is so rare today they had to invent institutional racism and disparate impact to find new reasons to exist. Dolezel is a deluded fool, but so is everybody else who expects orgs. like the NAACP to do anything positive for blacks whether their leaders are black or white.
It was started and run by Communists (like the ACLU), and it was always designed to destroy America. Its enemies were blacks like Booker T. Washington, who taught students how to succeed through hard work. In his autobiography (1901), he called out the black grievance industry for what it was: Blacks (and others) who would be disappointed and out of a job if things got better for black folks.
“There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well.” — Booker T. Washington
There was a movie in 1960 called I PASSED FOR WHITE. The actress was obviously white but she was outted for being half black. Does that mean Obama passed for white?
Now the ‘c’ in NAACP is a verb. The National Association for the Advancement of COLORED People. That means those who “colored” themselves.
Who would have ever thought that the Yankees would end up “on the wrong side of history”. God, I hate that phrase!
True. But there are also whites, like the author, who agree that “being black” creates an enforceable grievance against everyone else. That whites “owe” blacks, not just the common decency every human being owes every other, but more, perpetually, based strictly on - not skin color or personal experience - but “racial identification.”
This is nuts, just like Rachel Dolezal is nuts.
Langston is so dumb that he doesn’t realize the joke is on him and his fellow Blacks who continue to be obsessed with their race and fool themselves into thinking that the worst of them are the best of them. Ironic and sad that an “iconic poet” turns out to be so stupid and shallow.
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