Circle The Wagons: NAACP Stands By Rachel Dolezal

The NAACP is standing behind Rachel Dolezal, who reportedly has been faking her African-American identity for years:

For 106 years, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has held a long and proud tradition of receiving support from people of all faiths, races, colors and creeds. NAACP Spokane Washington Branch President Rachel Dolezal is enduring a legal issue with her family, and we respect her privacy in this matter. One’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership. The NAACP Alaska-Oregon-Washington State Conference stands behind Ms. Dolezal’s advocacy record. In every corner of this country, the NAACP remains committed to securing political, educational, and economic justice for all people, and we encourage Americans of all stripes to become members and serve as leaders in our organization.

Hate language sent through mail and social media along with credible threats continue to be a serious issue for our units in the Pacific Northwest and across the nation. We take all threats seriously and encourage the FBI and the Department of Justice to fully investigate each occurrence.

Yet, as Allahpundit point out over at Hot Air, the real issue is that she’s hijacked a racial identity to push–one could argue–a political agenda. And given that “racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard,” it makes Dolezal’s transformation in the name of social justice all the more bizarre. Of course, race isn’t a criterion with the NAACP; Spokane has had a white chapter president in the 1990s–and half the chapter members are white.  That's not the issue; it's really about honesty. Imagine if a conservative was caught lying about his or her ethnic/religious/or racial identity. Jeb Bush accidentally marked himself as Hispanic, and that got a ridiculous amount of media coverage. In Dolezal’s case, if it is confirmed that she’s indeed white, she knowingly did so, especially on the police oversight application form. That’s a serious problem. Most politicians lose their careers for perpetuating fraudulent information about their past. Apparently, Salon’s Joan Walsh has found this whole situation somewhat humorous, but says we might be laughing at the “unraveling of someone’s life, and we should adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude since we don’t “know exactly what she [Dolezal] did.”

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The Dolezal debacle started a social media discussion about “transracialism” and transracial = transgender analogies. In some instances, liberals were not really buying the whole Rachel Dolezal is the “Caitlyn Jenner of the African-American community” bit.

At the same time, when conservatives ask why this is a problem, but transgenderism is not–as the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway did–liberals summed it up in two responses: 1. Literally go f**k yourself 2. LOL

Hemingway also found it interesting that YouTube had removed Dolezal’s video on gender identity activism.

So, while some liberals are circling the wagons around Dolezal, the best defenders of her might be trolls who are experts at shredding progressive policies, like Godfrey Elfwick, who Allah says has “humor so dry that he’s fooled the BBC into treating him as a serious commentator…It’s like Stuxnet for SJW morons.”

On a serious note, I think Allahpundit probably cuts through this transgender/transracialism ... thing best:

I’m going to guess the progressive response goes something like this: Identifying as a woman isn’t a political identification, it’s a psychological urge that plays off biological differences. Bruce Jenner didn’t want to be a woman because he cares so deeply about equal pay for equal work, he wanted to be a woman because he “felt” feminine somehow and needed to express that. It’s hard to see what the analogy would be in Dolezal’s case. Did she always “feel” somehow that her skin should be darker than it really was? She claimed black identity, I assume, because she admired black culture and sympathized with the black experience in America, but rule one of progressivism is that a member of a privileged class can’t truly know what it means to be underprivileged, especially when privilege intersects with race. So Dolezal, a privileged white woman, comes off as grotesque, a cultural expropriator, while Jenner is okay.

The more cynical read on why progressives treat them differently is that one helps the lefty agenda while the other harms it. Jenner is another milepost in LGBT acceptance; the more mainstream she is, the more comfortable the public will be with gays, lesbians, and transgenders/transsexuals. Dolezal, meanwhile, diminishes the seriousness of civil rights for blacks by suggesting that being black is as easy as changing your hair and hitting the tanning bed more often.

So, this whole situation could bring up some very odd gender/racial theories from progressives who support and disagree with the whole notion that it's totally fine for someone to–you know–change their appearance to satisfy a certain need. At the same time, this could lead to a circular progressive firing squad, so maybe we should have our popcorn ready.

Bonus: That time Dolezal said she would be "nervous" at a Tea Party rally after taking notice to the all-white crowds. She has watched the rise of the Tea Party with "trepidation" (via NYT c. 2010):

Rachel Dolezal, curator of the Human Rights Education Institute in Coeur d’Alene, has also watched the Tea Party movement with trepidation. Though raised in a conservative family, Ms. Dolezal, who is multiracial, said she could not imagine showing her face at a Tea Party event. To her, what stands out are the all-white crowds, the crude depictions of Mr. Obama as an African witch doctor and the signs labeling him a terrorist. “It would make me nervous to be there unless I went with a big group,” she said.