I'd say that's a hell of a lot different.
How?
I fleshed out the post to elaborate. "Living as a black person" (while white) is crossing cultures. Living as a female (while male, or vice versa) is crossing
genders. Much more complex.
Born one xx (race, gender, species, whatever) but believing/living/changing one's appearance to reflect what they "feel" or "believe" they are. Both are complex. Are both sane or are both a little loose in the thinking though?
Everyone adopts appearance changes to reflect what they feel or do, or would like to be. We've noted Elvis adopting black dance moves and enunciation... baseball fans wearing jerseys with a player's name on them... Bo Derek in cornrows... Vanilla Ice with whatever his hangup is...
Here's a guy who's a rich, successful recording artist, songwriter actor ---
-- None of us really believe Tom Waits is a hobo who lives on the street.
I'm just not seeing a lot of distinction between those and this.
Not talking about adopting things of other cultures .. like Elvis and black dance moves. Talking about a person who believes they were born into the wrong gender is no different than someone who believes they were born into the wrong skin color ... or species ... or whatever. Either these people are openly accepted for what they 'believe' they are, or these people have something else going on upstairs and need help. All I'm saying is anyone giving this woman grief about her self-identifying as black must also give grief to say, Bruce Jenner re: his gender. Which leads to the interesting question of what is to stop someone from filling out a form with a different race/gender if that's how they 'feel' inside? Who is to say they're wrong? At what point does this all cross the line?
Does the subject here (I still haven't got her name -- Rachel) claim she was born into the wrong skin color? Has anyone anywhere claimed that?
When we say "black" (or white) it's a complex term; it can mean race in a clinical sense, or it can mean a culture in a broader social sense. All I've read here indicates this Rachel person means the latter context. Clearly there have been, and still are, those in the world who for whatever reason identify as a race they may not be in order to "pass" in the social hierarchy they wish to connect with. Light-skinned blacks had to do it for centuries in order to break out of a social caste, for one example. In New Orleans they had
three races, depending on not only skin color but one's geographical lineage.
Back in the daze of the "gentlemen's agreement" that kept black players out of baseball for six decades (the first being Moses Walker, 1884,
not Jackie Robinson 1947), this is where the hangup on skin color led to:
In 1901,
John McGraw, manager of the
Baltimore Orioles, tried to add
Charlie Grant to the roster as his second baseman. He tried to get around the Gentleman's Agreement by trying to pass him as a
Cherokee Indian named Charlie Tokohama. Grant went along with the charade. However, in Chicago Grant's African American friends who came to see him try out gave him away and Grant never got an opportunity to play ball in the big leagues.
[7]
... There possibly were attempts to have people of African descent be signed as Hispanics. One possible attempt may have occurred in 1911 when the
Cincinnati Reds signed two light-skinned players from
Cuba,
Armando Marsans and
Rafael Almeida. Both of them had played "Negro Baseball," barnstorming as members of the integrated
All Cubans. When questions arose about them playing the white man's game, the Cincinnati managers assured the public that "...they were as pure white as Castile soap."
[6] (
Wiki)
Get that? The managers assured the fans not that their players could play outfield or get on base --
but that their skin was white as soap.
How silly does that sound now? Yet it was the norm at that time and for decades before and after.
This thread kinda reminds me of that. Except in baseball's case they at least had an
unofficial ban on a race. NAACP does not.
