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<\/a>I learned of this outing-with-a-twist\u00a0last night on Twitter. Within a few minutes of the first link being posted, condemnation and piling on had begun, as it so often does on Twitter. The emerging consensus seems\u00a0to be that while it’s okay to be transgender, it’s not<\/em> okay to be transracial.<\/p>\n I’ve been busy this morning and haven’t revisited Twitter to see if opinions have changed, but from the links and comments I’m beginning to see on Facebook, I think most people disapprove of what this woman supposedly did.<\/p>\n I hate trials by social media, based as they always are\u00a0on incomplete\u00a0information. The as-yet unanswered questions are\u00a0why this woman pretended to be black and why she sought leadership positions\u00a0in\u00a0the Spokane NAACP chapter. It comes down to motivation, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n If she’d rather associate with African-Americans than whites, if she\u00a0likes the culture better than white culture,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>if she’s lived as an African-American woman for a number of years, if she’s working to advance the cause of African-Americans because she identifies as African-American\u00a0herself, that’s one thing. If, however,\u00a0her\u00a0motivation was just to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s wrong on every level, starting with the demeaning assumption that the African-American pond is a lesser one.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n I think, regardless of this particular woman’s motivations, the\u00a0collective judgment of both\u00a0the white and African-American communities\u00a0will be that it’s not okay to be transracial, no matter what your\u00a0motivation might be. You have to be real to be real.<\/p>\n I remember thinking something along these lines\u00a0as a kid, back in the early 1960s when a white journalist wrote a book called Black Like Me<\/em><\/a>. He had worn blackface and\u00a0ridden Greyhound buses through the American south to experience racial discrimination first hand, then written about it afterward. I wondered at the time why black writers couldn’t write about their own experiences. I learned later that many black writers had done exactly that, and brilliantly, and subsequently thought\u00a0Black Like Me<\/em> was\u00a0patronizing: we didn’t need white people telling\u00a0us what black people were experiencing.<\/p>\n This story also brings to mind the TERFs<\/a>, the trans-exclusionary radical feminists, who do not want trans women crashing the movement.<\/p>\n How much more\u00a0interesting this is than Caitlyn Jenner and\u00a0the Duggars! I can’t wait to hear more.<\/p>\n After I wrote about the swimming pool mini-race war<\/a> in McKinney, Texas, I started seeing “here’s what really<\/em> happened” apologias on conservative websites. I realize there are two sides to every story, and said so in a comment to my blog post after a couple of friends took me to task for making judgments before the facts are in.<\/p>\n The apologias on conservative websites tried to establish some heretofore unknown knowns:\u00a0that the black kids started the fight after white residents of the condo complex complained about their loud hip hop music and politely asked them to leave. More information has come out since. Today’s known knowns are that a white guy once convicted\u00a0of torturing animals<\/a> called the cops, and that two white ladies started the fight<\/a>\u00a0by punching the kids while\u00a0screaming racial epithets. Of course one known known all along, thanks to the video, was the cop’s out-of-control behavior.<\/p>\n I’m gonna stick my neck out one more time and say you can write this entire incident off to good old American racism.<\/p>\n This latest development is coming from the same place, American racism:<\/p>\n
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