visualizing the world's ten biggest oil and gas companies

Visual Capitalist

why angry negresses still stuck on rachel discrimination...,

radical extremism underlying domestic terrorism in the u.s.

splc |  In 2013, Josh Doggrell took the stage at the national conference for the neo-Confederate League of the South(LOS). In a non-descript suit-and-tie, he spoke about gun rights, county supremacy, the state of law enforcement in Alabama and his loyalty to the League.

“It’s wonderful to be around sanity,” the founder and chairman of the League’s John C. Calhoun chapter in a video of the event posted to YouTube.

It was a common speech for a League conference. But Doggrell wasn’t quite a common southern nationalist. He was a police officer, a lieutenant in the Anniston Police Department, and he wasn’t the only one. A second officer from his department, Lieutenant Wayne Brown, joined Doggrell at the convention, and they had come with good news –– good news for any self-respecting southern nationalist at least.

“The vast majority of men in uniform are aware that they’re southerners,” Doggrell said, touching on gun rights and the perennial fear among extremist groups that the Second Amendment is under attack. “And kith and kin comes before illegal national mandates.”

Doggrell knows a little bit about kith and kin. He joined the LOS in 1995 after meeting its presidentMichael Hill at the University of Alabama while Doggrell was a student, serving as the secretary vice chairman and chairman of the school’s LOS chapter before founding his own chapter in 2009.

Kith and kin is part of an explicitly racist ideology called “kinism” that Hill has long promoted through the LOS. The Kinist Institute, an organization that promotes kinism, has called for laws against racial intermarriage, an end to non-white immigration, expelling all “aliens” (“to include all Jews and Arabs”), and restricting the right to vote to white, landholding men over the age of 21. In the past, LOS websites have referred to kinism as “a biblical solution for all races” that will save the South by preventing “white genocide.”

It was an odd thing for a police officer to say, especially one from Anniston. Fifty years earlier, Klansmen firebombed several buses carrying civil rights workers, known as Freedom Riders, coming to the South to test a U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordering that buses be desegregated. On May 14, 1961, in Anniston, a mob of Klansmen, some reportedly still wearing their Sunday church clothes, attacked and firebombed the riders. Police did nothing.

But Doggrell has never hidden his extremist ties, not from his family – in 2013, his two-year-old was already a League member – and definitely not from his employer. As Doggrell boasts elsewhere in the video, his superiors are well aware of his associations.

“It’s always wonderful to go back and show my bosses all the radicals that I cavort with on the weekends,” he boasts.

The video was posted on YouTube two years ago by the Southern Nationalist Network and has only recently came to the attention of Hatewatch, which immediately sought to bring Doggrell’s associations to the city’s attention.

confederate flag head-fake from the inconvenient truth of domestic terrorism....,

politicalusa |  FBI Director James Comey determined that the mass murder of nine black people in their place of worship, including a Democratic state Senator who was working to get police to use body cameras after the shooting of an unarmed Walter Scott, is not terrorism.

Comey explained his thinking that alleged shooter Dylann Roof is not a domestic terrorist because he had no political motive:

“Terrorism is act of violence done or threatens to in order to try to influence a public body or citizenry so it’s more of a political act and again based on what I know so more I don’t see it as a political act. Doesn’t make it any less horrific the label but terrorism has a definition under federal law,” he said during a visit to Baltimore.

The FBI is investigating the shooting as a hate crime, as is the Charleston police department. 

On Friday, Department of Justice spokeswoman Emily Pierce said the DOJ was investigating the massacre as both a hate crime and an act of terrorism, “The department is looking at this crime from all angles, including as a hate crime and as an act of domestic terrorism.”

Terrorism is “the use of violence to physically and psychologically terrorize a population by an individual or a group in order to draw attention to a cause, enact political change, or gain political power.” Dylann Roof claimed blacks were taking over. He clearly had a right wing agenda to “preserve traditional social orders,” which is a form of terrorism. “Right Wing terrorism is commonly characterized by militias and gangs; many times these groups are racially motivated and aim to marginalize minorities within a state.”

Racially motivated to marginalize minorities. 

So the FBI thinks this isn’t terrorism because somehow they don’t see the political agenda behind the alleged shooter’s motives to get rid of black people and start a race war, or his obsession with Trayvon Martin’s murder. 

That is sort of like saying the Civil Rights Movement didn’t have a political agenda. There is nothing more political than attacking southern blacks in their place of worship to intimidate them and make a political statement.

last rhodesian canonical big donism...,

lastrhodesian |  I was not raised in a racist home or environment. Living in the South, almost every White person has a small amount of racial awareness, simply beause of the numbers of negroes in this part of the country. But it is a superficial awareness. Growing up, in school, the White and black kids would make racial jokes toward each other, but all they were were jokes. Me and White friends would sometimes would watch things that would make us think that “blacks were the real racists” and other elementary thoughts like this, but there was no real understanding behind it.

The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored? 

From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.

anti-intellectualism

wikipedia |  In The Powring Out of the Seven Vials (1642), the Puritan John Cotton wrote that 'the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee. ... Take off the fond doting ... upon the learning of the Jesuits, and the glorie of the Episcopacy, and the brave estates of the Prelates. I say bee not deceived by these pompes, empty shewes, and faire representations of goodly condition before the eyes of flesh and blood, bee not taken with the applause of these persons.'^[15] Not every Puritan concurred with Cotton's contempt for secular education; some founded universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth.

Economist Thomas Sowell^[16] argues that American anti-intellectualism can be traced to the early Colonial era, and that wariness of the educated upper-classes is understandable given that America was built, in large part, by people fleeing persecution and brutality at the hands of the educated upper classes. Additionally, rather few intellectuals possessed the practical hands-on skills required to survive in the New World, leading to a deeply rooted suspicion of those who may appear to specialize in "verbal virtuosity" rather than tangible, measurable products or services:

From its colonial beginnings, American society was a "decapitated" society—largely lacking the topmost social layers of European society. The highest elites and the titled aristocracies had little reason to risk their lives crossing the Atlantic and then face the perils of pioneering. Most of the white population of colonial America arrived as indentured servants and the black population as slaves. Later waves of immigrants were disproportionately peasants and proletarians, even when they came from Western Europe [...] The rise of American society to pre-eminence as an economic, political and military power was thus the triumph of the common man and a slap across the face to the presumptions of the arrogant, whether an elite of blood or books.

The source, Thomas Sowell, describes the effect the American Revolution had on the development of American government, as established by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In his opinion, the tendency to "disregard" the impartiality of the law depending upon "who you are" rather than what the author describes as the impartiality of the "supremacy of the law" conflicts with the American creed of the common man. According to Sowell, this fundamental right uniquely distinguishes the American character, forged by "the beaten men of beaten races," from that of the arrogant and privileged elites of the European aristocracy.^[17]

19th century

In the history of American anti-intellectualism, modern scholars^{[citation needed]} suggest that 19th-century popular culture is important, because, when most of the populace lived a rural life of manual labour and agricultural work, a 'bookish' education, concerned with the Græco-Roman classics, was perceived as of impractical value, ergo unprofitable—yet Americans, generally, were literate and read Shakespeare for pleasure—thus, the ideal "American" man was technically skilled and successful in his trade, ergo a productive member of society.^{[citation needed]} Culturally, the ideal American was a self-made man whose knowledge derived from life-experience, not an intellectual man, whose knowledge derived from books, formal education, and academic study; thus, in The New Purchase, or Seven and a Half Years in the Far West (1843), the Reverend Bayard R. Hall, A.M., said about frontier Indiana:

"We always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one, and, hence, attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since, unhappily, smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and [like-wise] incompetence and goodness."^[15]

Yet, the egghead's worldly redemption was possible if he embraced mainstream mores; thus, in the fiction of O. Henry, a character noted that once an East Coast university graduate 'gets over' his intellectual vanity—no longer thinks himself better than others—he makes just as good a cowboy as any other young man, despite his counterpart being the slow-witted naïf of good heart, a pop culture stereotype from stage shows.

we will all perish because the poor want to become rich and the rich want to stay that way

declineoftheempire |  Pope Francis issued an encyclical on climate change and human responsibility for the poor and the environment. I'll quote from The Guardian's report on the document.

Pope Francis has called on the world’s rich nations to begin paying their “grave social debt” to the poor and take concrete steps on climate change, saying failure to do so presents an undeniable risk to a “common home” that is beginning to resemble a “pile of filth”.

The pope’s 180-page encyclical on the environment, released on Thursday, is at its core a moral call for action on phasing out the use of fossil fuels.

But it is also a document infused with an activist anger and concern for the poor, casting blame on the indifference of the powerful in the face of certain evidence that humanity is at risk following 200 years of misuse of resources.

Hmmm... We have a "moral call for action on phasing out ... fossil fuels" and the "indifference of the powerful" to the risks posed by 200 years of "misuse" of resources, especially (I'm assuming) energy resources.

I do not want to get into this here, but I need to mention it—without fossil fuels, our precious global civilization would not exist. Let me repeat that—would not exist. Are we clear? At bottom, the rich nations do not want to phase out fossil fuels because without them, they wouldn't be rich anymore.

jeffrey sterling took on the cia and lost everything...,

firstlook |  Sterling’s case has drawn attention primarily for two reasons: it was part of the Obama Administration’s controversial crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers, and prosecutors had tried to force the Times reporter, James Risen, to divulge the name of his source, whom the government believed was Sterling. The case, known as United States of America v. Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, was treated mainly as a freedom-of-the-press issue, with Risen as the heroic centerpiece. Lost in the judicial briefs about the First Amendment was the black man in the middle. 

This is Sterling's story.

evangelicals centered in belief reject authentic christians and everyone else on global warming....,

WaPo |  Black Protestants were more than twice as likely to describe climate change as a serious problem, at 55 percent, than the 24 percent of their white evangelical peers who agreed. White, mainline Protestants fell somewhere between the two other groups on the question of how serious a threat global warming represents. A full 41 percent agreed that it is a "very serious problem."

The Pew poll also revealed signs that while Catholics as a group are more likely than Protestants to describe global warming as a real, man-made and very serious problem, Latino Catholics might be driving that difference. A full 82 percent of Latinos told pollsters that global warming is real, 60 percent said the problem was caused by human beings and 63 percent agreed that climate change represents a serious threat. By comparison,  just 64 percent of whites agreed that global warming is real, and 39 percent told pollsters that it is both man-made and a serious problem.

Another divide: Protestants who attended church least often were the most likely to view global warming as a real and serious problem of human origins, while the Catholics who attended Mass most frequently were most likely to agree.

In fact, environmental concerns do not begin to even out across the Protestant-Catholic split until pollsters also gathered data on just how people identify themselves politically. The results are clear. In fact, they have been clear for some time. Politics override everything.

Catholic Republicans were only slightly more likely, at 51 percent, to describe global warming as real and happening, than were the 45 percent of Republican Protestants who agreed. And the opinions of Democrats and independents nearly aligned across the Protestant, Catholic break.

That pattern suggests that faith might not influence the way that Americans view environmental matters nearly as deeply as do the long-standing partisan differences and allegiances that have become a defining part of membership in some groups.

An overwhelming number of white Protestant evangelicals, for instance, are Republicans. And the party's platform appears to have maintained deep influence in the way that white evangelicals respond to political questions about the environment. Of course, the relationship between the pope and the Catholic faithful is, by definition, considerably different from that of Protestant leadership organizations to the nation's many Protestant churches. But, guidance on environmental matters has been issued by many of the evangelical world's biggest voices and it's been out there for some time. That so few Protestants -- and particularly white evangelicals -- seem to describe climate change as a concern, much less as a problem to which they contribute, seems worth noting.

authentic christendom united on ecumenism, ecology, economy...,

time |  How can one not be moved by the criticism of our “culture of waste” or the emphasis on “the common good” and “the common destination of goods”? And what of the vital importance attributed to the global problem of clean water, which we have underlined for over two decades as we assembled scientists, politicians and activists to explore the challenges of the Mediterranean Sea (1995), the Black Sea (1997), the Danube River (1999), the Adriatic Sea (2002), the Baltic Sea (2003), the Amazon River (2006), the Arctic Sea (2007) and the Mississippi River (2009)? Water is arguably the most divine symbol in the world’s religions and, at the same time, the most divisive element of our planet’s resources.

In the final analysis, however, any dissent over land or water inevitably results in what the Pope’s statement calls “a decline in the quality of human life and a breakdown of society.” How could it possibly be otherwise? After all, concern for the natural environment is directly related to concern for issues of social justice, and particularly of world hunger. A church that neglects to pray for the natural environment is a church that refuses to offer food and drink to a suffering humanity. At the same time, a society that ignores the mandate to care for all human beings is a society that mistreats the very creation of God.

Therefore, the Pope’s diagnosis is on the mark: “We are not faced with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.” Indeed, as he continues to advance, we require “an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the underprivileged, and at the same time protecting nature.” It is also no surprise, then, that the Pope is concerned about and committed to issues like employment and housing.

Invoking the inspiring words of Scripture and the classics of Christian spirituality of East and West (particularly such saints as Basil the Great and Francis of Assisi), while at the same time evoking the precious works of Roman Catholic conferences of bishops throughout the world (especially in regions where the plunder of the earth is identified with the plight of the poor), Pope Francis proposes new paradigms and new policies in contrast to those of “determinism,” “disregard” and “domination.”

In 1997, we humbly submitted that harming God’s creation was tantamount to sin. We are especially grateful to Pope Francis for recognizing our insistence on the need to broaden our narrow and individualistic concept of sin; and we welcome his stress on “ecological conversion” and “reconciliation with creation.” Moreover, we applaud the priority that the papal encyclical places on “the celebration of rest.” The virtue of contemplation or silence reflects the quality of waiting and depending on God’s grace; and by the same token, the discipline of fasting or frugality reveals the power of not-wanting or wanting less. Both qualities are critical in a culture that stresses the need to hurry, the preeminence of individual “wants” over global “needs.”

In the third year of our brother Pope Francis’s blessed ministry, we count it as a true blessing that we are able to share a common concern and a common vision for God’s creation. As we stated in our joint declaration during our pilgrimage to Jerusalem last year:

“It is our profound conviction that the future of the human family depends also on how we safeguard – both prudently and compassionately, with justice and fairness – the gift of creation that our Creator has entrusted to us … Together, we pledge our commitment to raising awareness about the stewardship of creation; we appeal to all people of goodwill to consider ways of living less wastefully and more frugally, manifesting less greed and more generosity for the protection of God’s world and the benefit of His people.

blackest woman on the planet triggered rahowa...,

guardian |  Race is a big issue in the US. Always was, and seems like it always will be. And this week has been no exception.

Overnight, a young white man, Dylann Roof, walked into an iconic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and allegedly opened fire, killing nine people.

Fox News’s response was to reject any suggestion the shooting was a “hate crime”, before bringing on that time-honoured icon of white American dialogue – the Uncle Tom.

Bishop E W Jackson, from Chesepeake in Virginia (a mere 500km away), appeared on a morning Fox news program to explain, to nods of approval from the three white Fox news anchors, that the violence wasn’t about race. It was about Christianity.

Never mind the fact the shooter – pictured on his Facebook page wearing a shirt bearing the flag of apartheid South Africa – told the church gathering he had to kill the people who were “raping and killing” children in his neighbourhood.

If it was about Christianity – and obviously it wasn’t – but if it was, it begs the question why Fox News has refused to brand the attack an act of terrorism?

Of course, this shooting is just the latest race debate to grip the US.

Amid growing attention at the number of black men killed by white cops, the US media took a breather last week to focus its white-hot gaze on Rachel Dolezal, the president of the Spokane chapter for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who was recently outed as a white woman.

genetic engineering: technical challenge or moral challenge?

waitbutwhy |  He is very, very concerned about AI. I quoted him in my posts on AI saying that he fears that by working to bring about Superintelligent AI (ASI), we’re “summoning the demon,” but I didn’t know how much he thought about the topic. He cited AI safety as one of the three things he thinks about most—the other two being sustainable energy and becoming a multi-planet species, i.e. Tesla and SpaceX. Musk is a smart motherf---er, and he knows a ton about AI, and his sincere concern about this makes me scared.

— The Fermi Paradox also worries him. In my post on that, I divided Fermi thinkers into two camps—those who think there’s no other highly intelligent life out there at all because of some Great Filter, and those who believe there must be plenty of intelligent life and that we don’t see signs of any for some other reason. Musk wasn’t sure which camp seemed more likely, but he suspects that there may be an upsetting Great Filter situation going on. He thinks the paradox “just doesn’t make sense” and that it “gets more and more worrying” the more time that goes by. Considering the possibility that maybe we’re a rare civilization who made it past the Great Filter through a freak occurrence makes him feel even more conviction about SpaceX’s mission: “If we are very rare, we better get to the multi-planet situation fast, because if civilization is tenuous, then we must do whatever we can to ensure that our already-weak probability of surviving is improved dramatically.” Again, his fear here makes me feel not great.

— One topic I disagreed with him on is the nature of consciousness. I think of consciousness as a smooth spectrum. To me, what we experience as consciousness is just what it feels like to be human-level intelligent. We’re smarter, and “more conscious” than an ape, who is more conscious than a chicken, etc. And an alien much smarter than us would be to us as we are to an ape (or an ant) in every way. We talked about this, and Musk seemed convinced that human-level consciousness is a black-and-white thing—that it’s like a switch that flips on at some point in the evolutionary process and that no other animals share. He doesn’t buy the “ants : humans :: humans : [a much smarter extra-terrestrial]” thing, believing that humans are weak computers and that something smarter than humans would just be a stronger computer, not something so beyond us we couldn’t even fathom its existence.

— I talked to him for a while about genetic reprogramming. He doesn’t buy the efficacy of typical anti-aging technology efforts, because he believes humans have general expiration dates, and no one fix can help that. He explained: “The whole system is collapsing. You don’t see someone who’s 90 years old and it’s like, they can run super fast but their eyesight is bad. The whole system is shutting down. In order to change that in a serious way, you need to reprogram the genetics or replace every cell in the body.” Now with anyone else—literally anyone else—I would shrug and agree, since he made a good point. But this was Elon Musk, and Elon Musk fixes s--t for humanity. So what did I do?

Me: Well…but isn’t this important enough to try? Is this something you’d ever turn your attention to?

Elon: The thing is that all the geneticists have agreed not to reprogram human DNA. So you have to fight not a technical battle but a moral battle.

Me: You’re fighting a lot of battles. You could set up your own thing. The geneticists who are interested—you bring them here. You create a laboratory, and you could change everything.

Elon: You know, I call it the Hitler Problem. Hitler was all about creating the Übermensch and genetic purity, and it’s like—how do you avoid the Hitler Problem? I don’t know.

Me: I think there’s a way. You’ve said before about Henry Ford that he always just found a way around any obstacle, and you do the same thing, you always find a way. And I just think that that’s as important and ambitious a mission as your other things, and I think it’s worth fighting for a way, somehow, around moral issues, around other things.

Elon: I mean I do think there’s…in order to fundamentally solve a lot of these issues, we are going to have to reprogram our DNA. That’s the only way to do it.

Me: And deep down, DNA is just a physical material.

Elon: [Nods, then pauses as he looks over my shoulder in a daze] It’s software.

optogenetics meets crispr

thescientist |  The CRISPR gene-editing system just got even better: a new light-activated Cas9 nuclease could offer researchers greater spatial and temporal control over the RNA-guided nuclease activity, according to a study published today (June 15) in Nature Biotechnology.

“This is an effective new system for extremely precise control of gene editing via light,” Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research, told The Scientist in an e-mail. “Any technological advancement that can add in the precision and control of genetic modification is an important advance,” he added, noting that “this is one of many such efforts.”

Recently, University of Tokyo chemist Moritoshi Sato and his colleagues developed pairs of photoswitching proteins called Magnets, which use electrostatic interactions to come together when activated by light. The team has also used photoactivatable technology to develop a light-activated CRISPR-based transcription system to target specific genes for expression. Now, Sato’s group has taken this one step further, using its Magnet proteins to create a photoactivatable Cas9 nuclease (paCas9) for light-controlled genome editing.

“The existing Cas9 does not allow to modify genome of a small subset of cells in tissue, such as neurons in the brain,” Sato told The Scientist in an e-mail. “Additionally, the existing Cas9 often suffers from off-target effects due to its uncontrollable nuclease activity. . . . We have been interested in the development of a powerful tool that enables spatial and temporal control of genome editing.”

 

focus less on the hon.sis.rachel and more on what her example illuminates

dailynous |  Rebecca Kukla: First off, I am befuddled by how many people are interested in describing what was in Rachel Dolezal’s head and are willing to offer armchair diagnoses of her purported mental illness or condemnations of her motives. Not only do I not know what was in her head, but in fact, the more the conversation focuses on this particular person’s inner life, the less interesting I find the whole issue. The interesting question, I take it, is how to think and talk in general about people who identify and present as belonging to a race other than that assigned at birth, whatever their reasons and causes. I will focus on some meta-concerns about how we are talking about that question.

I am disappointed in how quickly almost everyone, including friends of mine who are strong anti-racist and trans allies, have been willing to engage in (1) ridicule and body-shaming – unabashedly mocking her hair and skin tone for instance; (2) confident descriptions of her as a liar who is choosing to pretend to be something she is not; and (3) fast and confident claims that she can’t claim black identity because she is appropriating a culture, hasn’t grown up with the black experience, can opt out at any time, etc. My main reaction to all this is that it’s surprisingly historically short-sighted and lacking in epistemic humility. So many times, ‘we’ (those of us with a recognizable and reasonably well-established embodied, socially positioned identity) have encountered a new way of being, and have responded with ridicule, shaming, and charges of lying. So often we think that forms of identity that have no clear social place are hilarious and clearly a pretense and that their bearers are fair game for humiliation. Honestly, I don’t know if Dolezal experienced herself as lying, or as making a voluntary choice to deceive, and more generally I don’t know whether or how there might be a legitimate place for transracial identities, as opposed to, in effect, race ‘drag,’ which is what almost everyone seems to assume is going on in Dolezal’s case. But I have learned from experience that body shaming and ridicule are always unhelpful and problematic, and that what we shame and dismiss one year we often come to understand and defend ten years later. I also know that people are driven to lie and deceive in seemingly incomprehensible ways when they find themselves without any socially recognizable way of being. As for the confident claims that Dolezal, or people like her, have no right to black identities because they didn’t have a lifetime of black experience, or because they are being appropriative of the experience and identity markers of an oppressed group, or because they want access to a community that their bodies preclude them from properly joining, or that their presence in black spaces threatens the integrity of those spaces for ‘real’ black people: well, I feel the pull of those arguments for sure, and I don’t want to dismiss them. But boy do they sound exactly analogous to ‘feminist’ arguments that were used to vilify and undercut the entire reality of trans women back in the not-too-long-ago day. I just don’t have the confidence that would allow me to proclaim immediately that this time the critique fits, that there is no real phenomenon here, no human need or way of being that requires understanding and a reconfiguration of my settled concepts. Can’t we learn from the past and proceed a little more slowly?

One final point: I’ve seen several philosophers online say that before we can settle what to think about the possibility of transracial identity, we need to know more about the metaphysics of race. I think this is exactly wrong. The question is not what race ‘really’ is, because whatever the difficult answer to that, we are all walking around with a phenomenological sense of self that does not hinge on or even include this answer, and race has a powerful social life independent of its proper metaphysics. Whether transracial identity is possible and should be given social uptake strikes me as a thoroughly political question about how various ways of claiming and recognizing identity do and don’t do harm to individuals and to communities. I can’t imagine how this hinges on metaphysics. Even if there was some real thingamajig in people that constituted their race, such that if they claimed to have a different one then they were saying something false (and does anyone think that, seriously?), I can’t see how that would settle any of the interesting questions about how people experience themselves and what sorts of identity-building we should acknowledge, support, or challenge.

the root's entire staff is so up in its feelings - that they're incoherent...,

the root |  My mother handled these issues and raised me well, so I don’t need you to cry for me, wannabe Teena Marie. But do know that the last act I performed to honor her life—which, true to the experience of all too many American women who actually possess African genes, ended a good 15 years earlier than a white woman’s life expectancy—was to change the race on her death certificate from white, which the hospital assumed that she was (the daily presence of her brown-skinned children be damned; at least they could have asked), to black, since that’s how she both identified and lived.

Yes, Rachel, I know that there’s a way in which that act was just as crazy as the one-drop rule, but I fought the last fight she couldn’t fight for herself. Plus, how can you be born colored and die white? May the good Lord bless my mother (and father).

So this, Rachel, is why I am challenging you to do better, for these reasons and the fact that mixed in with your very human and understandable identity issues is your racial privilege, multiplied by your opportunism, to the cultural-appropriation power. (That’s my hairstyle you’re wearing, sweetie, but it probably never occurred to you that some of us, in order to wear it and other natural styles, have to overcome a cultural beauty standard that tells us that the way God made us is ugly.)

For the most part, I think you mean well, and I don’t want to minimize the good deeds that you’ve done. But please do “the work” and become a true ally and stop playing the community that you say you love, as though we’re not intelligent enough to peep your B.S. Instead, please support us by doing the things you can do that we can’t, from your identity position as a white woman.

It may be a while before you gain that level of insight. Until then, I do understand that membership has its privileges. I’m not a wagering woman, but if I were, I’d bet that you will be on the speaking circuit soon, getting paid rates that rival, if not exceed, those paid to highly qualified speakers of color, some of whom I could name-check by tagging them, but I won’t. Oh, and you’ll probably get a book deal, too. But if any sistah I know helps you write it (ahem!), trust and believe that we will call in the Drop Squad. I’m quite sure you watch movies and know what that is.

rachel discrimination is a butt-hurt weak negroe thang, you wouldn't understand....,

historymatters |  As for the literature, painting, and sculpture of Aframericans—such as there is—it is identical in kind with the literature, painting, and sculpture of white Americans: that is, it shows more or less evidence of European influence. In the field of drama little of any merit has been written by and about Negroes that could not have been written by whites. The dean of the Aframerican literati written by and about Negroes that could not have been written by whites. The dean of the Aframerican literati is W. E. B. Du Bois, a product of Harvard and German universities; the foremost Aframerican sculptor is Meta Warwick Fuller, a graduate of leading American art schools and former student of Rodin; while the most noted Aframerican painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner, is dean of American painters in Paris and has been decorated by the French Government. Now the work of these artists is no more “expressive of the Negro soul”—as the gushers put it—than are the scribblings of Octavus Cohen or Hugh Wiley.

This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the European immigrant after two or three generations of exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American. Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion that the black American is so “different” from his white neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the word “Negro” conjures up in the average white American’s mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists. Your average Aframerican no more resembles this stereotype than the average American resembles a composite of Andy Gump, Jim Jeffries, and a cartoon by Rube Goldberg.

Again, the Aframerican is subject to the same economic and social forces that mold the actions and thoughts of the white Americans. He is not living in a different world as some whites and a few Negroes would have me believe. When the jangling of his Connecticut alarm clock gets him out of his Grand Rapids bed to a breakfast similar to that eaten by his white brother across the street; when he toils at the same or similar work in mills, mines, factories, and commerce alongside the descendants of Spartacus, Robin Hood, and Erik the Red; when he wears similar clothing and speaks the same language with the same degree of perfection; when he reads the same Bible and belongs to the Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, or Catholic church; when his fraternal affiliations also include the Elks, Masons, and Knights of Pythias; when he gets the same or similar schooling, lives in the same kind of houses, owns the same Hollywood version of life on the screen; when he smokes the same brands of tobacco and avidly peruses the same puerile periodicals; in short, when he responds to the same political, social, moral, and economic stimuli in precisely the same manner as his white neighbor, it is sheer nonsense to talk about “racial differences” as between the American black man and the American white man. Glance over a Negro newspaper (it is printed in good Americanese) and you will find the usual quota or crime news, scandal, personals, and uplift to be found in the average white newspaper—which, by the way, is more widely read by the Negroes than is the Negro press. In order to satisfy the cravings of an inferiority complex engendered by the colorphobia of the mob, the readers of the Negro newspapers are given a slight dash of racialistic seasoning. In the homes of the black and white Americans of the same cultural and economic level one finds similar furniture, literature, and conversation. How, then, can the black American be expected to produce art and literature dissimilar to that of the white American?

Consider Coleridge-Taylor, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Claude McKay, the Englishmen; Pushkin, the Russian; Bridgewater, the Pole; Antar, the Arabian; Latino, the Spaniard; Dumas, père and fils,the Frenchmen; and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles W. Chestnut, and James Weldon Johnson, the Americans. All Negroes; yet their work shows the impress of nationality rather than race. They all reveal the psychology and culture of their environment—their color is incidental. Why should Negro artists of America vary from the national artistic norm when Negro artists in other countries have not done so? If we can foresee what kind of white citizens will inhabit this neck of the woods in the next generation by studying the sort of education and environment the children are exposed to now, it should not be difficult to reason that the adults of today are what they are because of the education and environment they were exposed to a generation ago. And that education and environment were about the same for blacks and whites. One contemplates the popularity of the Negro-art hokum and murmurs, “How-come?”

This nonsense is probably the last stand or the old myth palmed off by Negrophobists for all these many years, and recently rehashed by the sainted Harding, that there are “fundamental, eternal, and inescapable differences” between white and black Americans. That there are Negroes who will lend this myth a helping hand need occasion no surprise. It has been broadcast all over the world by the vociferous scions of slaveholders, “scientists” like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, and the patriots who flood the treasure of the Ku Klux Klan; and is believed, even today, by the majority of free, white citizens. On this baseless premise, so flattering to the white mob, that the blackamoor is inferior and fundamentally different, is erected the postulate that he must needs be peculiar; and when he attempts to portray life through the medium of art, it must of necessity be a peculiar art. While such reasoning may seem conclusive to the majority of Americans, it must be rejected with a loud guffaw by intelligent people.

too black, too strong - weak negroes not gonna get it

newyorker |  The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie.

Dolezal’s name has been added to a running discussion of racial appropriation. Two weeks ago, Chet Haze, the putative rapper and son of the actor Tom Hanks, took to Instagram with a questionable syllogism. Because hip-hop is, in his view, “not about race,” and because he so closely identifies with the genre, he should be allowed to use the word “nigger” (or its variant “nigga”) without recrimination. His comments recalled the feeble musings of John Mayer, five years ago, when he lamented to Playboy that his level of black cred was high enough, his standing within the race so unimpeachable, that he ought to be able to toss the epithet with the same sort of entitlement as Jay Z. And last week, the Washington Post published a timeline of the career implosion of Iggy Azalea, the white Australian rapper notable for her transparent racial affectations.

Among African-Americans, there is a particular contempt, rooted in the understanding that black culture was formed in a crucible of degradation, for what Norman Mailer hailed as the “white Negro.” Whatever elements of beauty or cool, whatever truth or marketable lies there are that we associate with blackness, they are ultimately the product of a community’s quest to be recognized as human in a society that is only ambivalently willing to see it as such. And it is this root that cannot be assimilated. The white Negroes, whose genealogy stretches backward from Azalea through Elvis and Paul Whiteman, share the luxury of being able to slough off blackness the moment it becomes disadvantageous, cumbersome, or dangerous. It is an identity as impermanent as burnt cork, whose profitability rests upon an unspoken suggestion that the surest evidence of white superiority is the capacity to exceed blacks even at being black. The black suspicion of whites thus steeped in black culture wasn’t bigotry; it was a cultural tariff—an abiding sense that, if they knew all that came with the category, they would be far less eager to enlist.

raised by christian cultists, touched by "Jesus", and sheltered in immaculate complexion

denverpost |  Joshua Dolezal is accused of assaulting a child who was about 6 years old in 2000 or 2001 in Clear Creek County where the Dolezals lived at the time, according to an arrest affidavit. The alleged victim told investigators Joshua Dolezal also abused another person. 

The affidavit shows that after the allegations were reported in July 2013, a detective interviewed someone in Spokane as part of the investigation. The person's name is redacted in the report.

The alleged victim told investigators Joshua Dolezal warned, "Don't tell anyone or I'll hurt you," according to the affidavit. It also says the person decided to come forward after the birth of Joshua Dolezal's daughter because of concerns about the child's well-being.

He was charged in March 2014 and is free on $15,000 bail, according to court records.
Joshua Dolezal is scheduled to face trial in August. Neither Dolezal nor his Denver-based lawyers responded to messages seeking comment. Fifth Judicial District Attorney Bruce Brown also declined to comment.

Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal, in an interview about their daughter with Spokane television station KHQ last week, avoided questions about any family legal matters in Colorado.

"It's better if we don't (comment)," Larry Dolezal told the station. "It's a separate matter."
On NBC's Today, Dolezal's parents said Monday they disclosed their daughter's true race because they didn't want to lie to an inquiring reporter.

"I think Rachel has tried to damage her biological family," Ruthanne Dolezal said. She said Rachel began to "disguise herself" after her parents adopted four African-American children more than a decade ago.

history will not be kind to rachel discriminators...,

Michael Jackson bleached his skin and had his face reconstructed to the point of unrecognizability to become more white, and nobody accused him of being a fraud or a huckster.

Rachal Dolezal seems clearly dedicated to Black folks and the extent of her identification with Black folks seems beyond reproach. She has caused no harm and done much good. No serious person would claim that working on behalf of the NAACP and as a temporary adjunct in Africana studies is for the money?

Throughout this purely political, purely schadenfreud laden episode, all the Rachel discriminators have only picked at what will serve their own agendi. Negroes losing their minds about her in that elected NAACP office remind me of nothing so much as teatards losing their minds about the elected Hon.Bro.Preznit in the White House.  How dare that Muslim/Kenyan non-citizen ascend to the highest prestige echelon this patriot's country has to offer! Puh-leeze.....,

There is very obviously a serious underlying issue with her Ken Hamm cultist parents at the root of her estrangement from them, and, likely involved as the source/initiator of her choosing to identify with being Black. The mainstream narrative is working overtime to keep this as the great invisible elephant in the room. Though some may believe that the power of propaganda and the pervasiveness of mass stupidity so great that everyone can be kept distracted from this indefinitely. I don't think so. Based on the way she handled herself with Matt Lauer, I firmly believe that the real reason(s0 why she did what she did will eventually come out and be properly understood. F'zample, why does she have custody of Isaiah adopted by the Hammcultists?

Anyway, the other dimension of schadenfreud attendent to this story is the forbidden desire to discuss identity and genetic determinism in the light of the currently highly propagandized and forced acceptance of the Kardashian-related science project.

black like me

wikipedia |  Black Like Me is a nonfiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin first published in 1961. Griffin was a white native of Dallas, Texas and the book describes his six-week experience travelling on Greyhound buses (occasionally hitchhiking) throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia passing as a black man. Sepia Magazine financed the project in exchange for the right to print the account first as a series of articles.

Griffin kept a journal of his experiences; the 188-page diary was the genesis of the book.

At the time of the book's writing in 1959, race relations in America were particularly strained and Griffin aimed to explain the difficulties that black people faced in certain areas. Under the care of a doctor, Griffin artificially darkened his skin to pass as a black man.

In 1964, a film version of Black Like Me starring James Whitmore was produced.^[1]

Robert Bonazzi subsequently published the book Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me.

The title of the book is taken from the last line of the Langston Hughes poem "Dream Variations".