The media has recently focused upon Rachel Dolezal, a white
woman and activist with the NAACP, who has chosen to describe herself as black.
She is, according to her own story, trans-racial, in a similar way as a male or
female may be trans-gender. She identifies herself as being black. This isn’t such
a new phenomenon. There was the case of Grey Owl aka Archibald Belaney from
Hastings who took on the persona of a Native American and engaged in popularising
nature conservation in Canada. Many light-skinned black people have historically
passed themselves off for white to escape discrimination and prejudice in their
lives. Nor can we forget Michael Jackson’s attempt to de-racialise his
appearance.
However, in the racially charged atmosphere of contemporary
United States where police are repeatedly exonerated of killing unarmed African-American
men; when the prisons are disproportionately filled with African-Americans; and
how a white supremacist can carry out a murderous terror attack on an
African-American church in the hope of igniting a race war, Dolezal’s choice of
being who she wants to be has led to her either being described as a traitor to
her own kind, the white race, or a fraud masquerading as black for personal advancement.
Little is said of her troubled family background where she was brought up by
strict disciplinarian Christian fundamentalist parents who believed in beating their
children and who she accused of child abuse, going on to successfully acquire
legal guardianship from the courts of one of her adopted black brothers, who,
she refers to as her "son". When her biological brother was accused
of sexually abusing a black child, she further distanced herself from her
family by supporting the victim. Dolezal also posted pictures of a black man, claiming
that it was her actual father rather than a father-figure to her. It's easy to understand
from this why she may well possess an issue with her own identity from such a
dysfunctional upbringing. Socialists,
however, wonder why people are we getting so het up about Dolezal when we
recognise no such genetic thing as race and argue that race like nationality is
an artificial construct.
If we need evidence of such, we can highlight the Dominican
Republic where tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people of Haitian
descent have had their nationality taken away. Antihaitianismo is a racist bias
against Haitians and descendants of Haitians by Dominicans. Apparently, you can
tell a Haitian because they are blacker than the lighter-skinned (mulatto) Dominicans.
That’s how authorities identify Haitians, by skin colour and physical features as
well as accent (a difficulty in rolling one’s r and j). So if you look “Haitian” or are “Dominican
with Haitian features,” then you are in the count for deportation. Race in the
Dominican Republic not mean the same thing as it does in other parts of the
world. Dominicans use a variety of words to represent a range of skin tones,
such as moreno / canelo / indio / indiesito / blanquito/ trigueno/
blanco-oscuro and rubio, all indicating different colours or different types of
mixed racial origins. Not many Dominicans will voluntarily choose the term
"black."
According to a study
conducted by the Dominican Studies Institute CUNY, about 90% of the
contemporary Dominican population has ancestry from West and Central Africa in
different degrees yet Dominicans will insist that their heritage is European. Because
of this imposed euro-centrism and past institutionalised racism by Spanish
colonisers, Dominicans have been forced to believe that since the Haitian
population is "blacker," it's meant to be regarded as inferior. There
is an obsession by the Dominicans to define themselves as something not Haitian
and African. A Dominican whose skin colour is midway between a mulatto and a
Black is identified as being of Indian origin. The anthropologist Juan
Rodríguez pointed out mitochondrial-DNA evidence reveals "85 percent of
the residents ... have African ancestry, 9.4 percent Indian and less than 0.08
percent European while on the father's side, through Y-DNA, we now know that
only 1 percent are descended from an Indian male and 36 percent from an African
male.* Yet the average person describes their race as
indio. The term indio is entirely made up. Descendants of Africans slaves
adopted the term Indio in an effort to purge themselves of their slave
background. They could never attain the status attributed to white, but wanted
to get rid of their African past, which was associated to slavery.
Race is not rooted in biological fact. It is an idea which
human beings impose on themselves and racism is an issue for the working class
which they must deal with and over-come in their progress to a sane, free,
humane social system.
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