Well, it’s come to this [emphasis mine]:
Most voters agree that racial identity should be based on birth, not preference, but black voters are less critical than others of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black who recently resigned from her post at the NAACP.A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 63% of Likely U.S. Voters believe Dolezal was being deceitful by claiming she was black. Just 13% disagree, while 23% are not sure.
However, while most white (65%) and other minority voters (68%) believe Dozelal [sic] was being deceitful, just 46% of black voters agree.
In fact, 52% of black voters think Dolezal should have stayed in her position as President of a Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a view shared by just 20% of whites and 32% of other minority voters. Majorities of the latter two groups think she should have resigned from her post.
Among all voters, 56% agree with Dolezal’s decision to resign, while 25% think she should have stayed in the position. Eighteen percent (18%) are not sure.
Most voters (65%) believe that racial identity should be based on birth rather than preference. Just 14% think it should be determined by preference, but another 21% are not sure.
Sixty-seven percent (67%) of white voters and 62% of other minority voters think racial identity is determined by birth, a view shared by 51% of black voters. A quarter of black and other minority voters think it should be determined by preference.
…
The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on June 18 and 21, 2015 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
It just comes to show you that in a country with more than 300 million people, more than a few will have a few lug nuts loose. Rachel Dolezal is the former president of the Spokane NAACP chapter. Last week, she resigned when it was discovered that she had lied about her racial identity; Dolezal is white, but was trying to pass off being black. She identifies herself as black, and says there is no "biological proof” that she comes from white parents, despite a birth certificate indicating something that’s quite contrary to her version of events. To make matters more bizarre, she allegedly told her brother to avoid blowing “her cover,” and even criticized the invitation of a white antiracism scholar to speak at Eastern Washington University–where she serves as an adjunct professor of Africana Studies–since she thought a white person had no authority on the subject. When she was doing social justice work in Idaho, media outlets reported she was “transracial” or “biracial;” she never corrected the record.
Moreover, what is the cause of this divide? Only 46 percent of black voters think Dolezal was deceitful, and 52 percent think she should have remained on the job at the NAACP? This woman is arguably a fraud, who hijacked a racial identity to further a political agenda, when it was wholly unnecessary. White people aren’t barred from the NAACP, and Spokane had a white chapter president in the 1990s–half the chapter is made up of people of European descent.
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Yet, given her reported fraudulent actions–she also sued Howard University in 2002 as a white person–is that a good thing for the NAACP? Is having an alleged race-based charlatan as one the of folks constituting the end of the spear regarding their grassroots activism?
Are there no standards? Well, the NAACP has already stood by Dolezal, so I guess not.
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