part 1 / part 2 / part 3 / part 4
"I was born male but had gender reassignment surgery."
"What was the most painful part?"
"When they cut my salary in half."
There are certain gender identity issues that remain consistent from culture to culture.
African-American culture, however, is a result of white American attitudes towards race (and by extension, class).
Identical triplets separated at birth and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Nairobi, and Port-au-Prince will have radically different cultural backgrounds.
Hell, identical triplets raised in Baldwin Hills, Chicago’s South Side, and Ferguson will al experience radically different cultures.
So what exactly is “race identity disorder”?
It’s not something that’s necessarily inherent, such as a feeling one’s skin color / eye shape / hair texture is wrong.
And it’s not a desire to disguise one’s self for protection: That’s an eminently sensible strategy under a wide variety of circumstances.
There is something much more intellectual about it, conscious and deliberate than gender identify disorder or body integrity identity disorder.
It’s a conscious realization something is amiss in the social order.
Now, there are plenty of people who will snicker at this idea, the sort of people who denigrate those they refer to as “social justice warriors”.
They represent a desire to deny the obvious, because to admit to the obvious demands change.
Change, or an acknowledgement that one is a major component of the problem.
Change for the good, for the better…
…or embrace the evil.
I can’t and won’t presume to know what was going through Dolezal’s head when she began her hoax, but the way her thoughts manifested themselves indicates she was moving away from the status quo.
Lots of people change their identities, move away from the status quo.
part 6 / part 7 / part 8 / part 9