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Saturday, June 13, 2015

Race and Gender as Self Identity Issues



Who is Black or White, Female or Male?  Is "call me Caitlin" Jenner female or male?  Jenner has male genitalia and male XY chromosomes that can never be surgically altered.

As Elizabeth Price Foley points out
Homer Plessy, the plaintiff in the famous “separate but equal” Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, was 7/8 white and 1/8 black,
According to Louisiana law at that time that made him black, but what race was he really?

Barack Obama had a White mother and a Black father but he self-identifies as Black. But what is he really? If he decided, like Jenner, that he's really mentally female, would he be the first Black Female president? How much Black blood in post Civil Rights America does it take to be Black, or White? What would Homer Plessey be considered by today's America and today's judicial system? Would Homer be entitled to claim all the privileges of Affirmative Action? Even as he's claiming to really be White?

Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) identified herself as American Indian without any evidence and despite looking as  white as the Pillsbury Dough Boy.  She was rewarded with the benefits of affirmative action, getting a highly compensated Professorship at Harvard.  And despite her non-Indian identity no being common knowledge the Left wing of the Democrat Party desperately want her to be their next President. 

Foley again:
Self-identification does appear, at least to the political left, to be the sine qua non of gender. Progressives/liberals have aggressively defended the “right” of Bruce Jenner to call himself a “woman,” if/when he so desires ...

If gender is merely a matter of self-identification, should not race be also? I have always thought that, given the affirmative action-laden higher education admissions process, applicants should self-identify as “black” or “Native American” whenever they so desire. I mean, why not? If they feel black or Native American, should not they be able to claim such an identity, as Rachel Dolezal has done? Doing so would quickly cause affirmative action to collapse of its own ridiculous weight....

What would a university do if an applicant self-identified as “black” on an application but showed up looking “white”? And if the university made such a judgment, what on earth would that mean? How would the university defend its belief that a student didn’t “look” black? What sort of bizarre racial stereotypes would it rely upon in making such an appearance-based judgment? And if the university actually decided to take action against the student for racial misrepresentation, what on earth would that mean? How would the university judge whether the student was really “black”? What percentage of blood would suffice for such a progressive institution? Fifty percent? Ten percent? One percent?

If Left-dominated institutions now accept self-identification it makes sense to claim the identity of favored groups.

I think someone once said that you should make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.  The Left wrote this book of rules, let's run with it.



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