Passing

Whites and mixed race people are "identifying" as other races. If being non-white is a disadvantage, why are whites and mixed race people "passing"?

Obama once said of himself: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

The color white, as defined in physics, is light seen by the human eye when all wavelengths of the visible spectrum combine. White is the presence of all colors; black is defined as the total absence of all colors.

Movie and projector screens are white because the color white reflects all other color light evenly.

Extrapolating from those three things and applying the result to social issues, and the result is that white people are the blank screen which reflect all the biases people wish to project upon them. At the risk of mixing metaphors, white Americans have become the empty vessels into which people of all political bents pour their hatred.

Whites are bad because the are white. They are the only race that cannot understand anything about the other races, they are completely incapable of understanding the “lived experiences” of any American minority, sex, gender or sexual orientation – and yet, those groups completely understand what makes white people tick.

That is considered stereotyping and racism if a white person does them to another race, but not if another race does it to white people.

That prejudice reveals itself when whites “pass” as another race. “Passing” was once a uniquely minority activity – light skinned blacks were primarily the practitioners of appearing, acting and living as “white” to “pass” and take advantage of opportunities afforded whites.

Now it is interesting that “passing” seems to be a white thing.

We are all familiar with some of the instances:

• Rachel Dolezal, a white woman passing as black, became a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter president.

• John Howard Griffin, the author of Black Like Me (published in 1961), darkened his skin to understand the “black experience”.

• Shaun King (aka Talcum X), allegedly a black activist but mostly a grifter, is the product of a white mother and a white man is listed as his father on his birth certificate – allegedly, Talcum was told by his mother that his real father was a “light-skinned black man”.

• Elizabeth “Lieawatha” Warren claimed Native American ancestry to garner advancement opportunities at Harvard, but now is in her second term as an uber-left Senator from Massachusetts.

The left seems especially vulnerable to white passing.

I just read an article in the Intercept about Raquel Evita Saraswati, who is described as:

“…a Muslim activist who for years has encouraged people to believe that she is a woman of color, including Latina as well as of South Asian and Arab descent, is the AFSC’s chief equity, inclusion, and culture officer, a senior position that gives her access to the files of dozens of the organization’s staff and volunteers.”

The trouble is that Saraswati is none of that and was born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel. Her mother says she is absolutely not a person of color, according to her mother, Carol Perone.

“I call her Rachel,” Perone told The Intercept, when reached by telephone. “I don’t know why she’s doing what she’s doing.”

Her mother added that Rachel is of British, German, and Italian descent — not Latina, South Asian, or Arab. “I’m as white as the driven snow,” added Perone. “And so is she.”

Why was Rachel chosen for this job, one she has apparently been doing well (or well enough)?

According to Oskar Pierre Castro, who led the search committee to fill the DEI position, described how Raquel/Rachel seemed like an ideal candidate.

“It really touched all the points,” said Castro. “In my mind it was, ‘Great, a person of color, a queer person of color, who happens to be a Muslim, it’s a woman, all these things, and someone who seemed to get it. I definitely feel conned. … I feel deceived.”

Yeah, well you were conned. Mostly by yourself.

So why did they do it? Why try to pass as non-white?

Probably for the same reason biracial people like Barack Obama, Colin Kaepernick, Patrick Mahomes, Megan Markle, Zendaya and Benjamin Todd Jealous (who was the Democratic nominee for Governor of Maryland in the 2018 and the former president and chief executive officer of the NAACP) choose to “identify” as black when they all had a white parent.

Because white people are evil oppressors; therefore, there is an advantage to identifying as non-white.

But a white person being able to “pass” and do a job that requires “understanding the lived experience” of another race seems to indicate that they can actually understand that lived experience.

It can be said that I cannot understand the “black experience” and likely I am just a racist – but the fact is that after growing up poor in rural Mississippi in the middle of the Civil Rights struggle, I can guarantee that I understand that “experience” better than Barack Obama (who is rumored to have been born in Hawaii) or the Bronx born Eric Holder.

What all this proves is skin color alone is not a determinant of success, good or evil, or what the person has “experienced” – and anyone who claims it is, is simply a racist, no matter their skin color.