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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12383 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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So far as I'm aware, every prominent recent example of a person openly identifying as transracial or being exposed as a racial charlatan (in the sense of trying to pass themselves off as a member of an ethnic group they're not, by subterfuge) has been a white person. The canonical example is of a white female academic, activist or politician who presents herself as Latina, Native American or more rarely black, in order to secure a job which is explicitly or implicitly ringfenced for members of such groups. But they don't seem to be doing this cynically, as an expression of their contempt for subaltern ethnic groups. In essentially all cases of note, the person in question seems so socially progressive and steeped in post-colonial theory that they almost seem to wish they really were members of these ethnic groups, and so they're playing an elaborate game of Butlerian performative declaration (clap your hands if you believe): announcing that they are members of these ethnic groups makes them so.

Is there a corresponding trend, for non-white people to identify as white, or try to deceitfully pass themselves off as such? And I'm not talking about implicitly (e.g. Indian women using skin-lightening creams), but explicitly the way white progressives do.

It’s called ‘passing’ and it’s so unremarkable as to be cliche.

But is there a prominent recent example of it?

Prominent? Not really, no, it’s a dog bites man story.

Bobby Fischer emphatically denied his own jewishness towards the end of his life, but he didn't get any financial benefit from doing that, it was done as a performative political gesture.

Mindy Kaling’s brother (Tamil) famously passed himself off as black when applying for college iirc.

I initially thought this might not actually be a lie in the strict sense, because Kaling’s family may have lived in East Africa prior to immigrating (like the family of Rishi Sunak, for instance). This would make Kaling and her brother “African-American” in the same sense as Elon Musk.

But nope, turns out the Chokalingams came straight to America from India, no politically-expedient stopover in Africa involved. Which makes Mindy’s brother an out-and-out liar.

Wolbachia is a bacterial parasite that affects, among other things, malaria carrying mosquitos. Despite it being a quintessential parasite, because it feeds on something that hurts us it is on net a benefit to humanity. Same with Mindy's brother who fed on the woke spoils system. I hope he drained it as much as possible for himself.

Back in the 19th century, it wasn't uncommon for a black person, or especially a mixed person, to try to pass as white.

There's also the classic Eddie Murphy SNL skit where he goes about a day of his life in whiteface (White Like Me), though viewers seeing it as absurdist might be taken as a sign that it wasn't common.

Yes, I'm familiar with the phenomenon you're describing, and the fact that at least some white people in certain industries think their careers would stand to benefit by attempting to pass themselves off as non-white people shows how far the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. More recently, Philip Roth wrote a novel about a black man whose career in academia can be at least partly attributed to successfully passing himself off as Jewish, which was widely (and apparently erroneously) believed to have been inspired by Anatole Broyard, a mixed-race writer and critic who died in 1990 and who passed himself off as white.

I'm curious if the phenomenon still exists in the "non-white -> white" direction, as opposed to its modern incarnation of "white -> non-white". Given the online circles in which I move, I hear about just about every example of a white academic or activist who gets exposed for pretending to be non-white, or a white teenager who "identifies as" trans-Korean or similar. It's possible that the reverse case may be equally common, but I just haven't heard of it because I'm in an echo chamber.

Skin-lightening products are a gigantic industry. Just who do you think is buying them(well, yes, women, but what kind of woman)?

The politician Geert Wilders in the Netherlands is actually 1/4-Indonesian but dyes his hair blonde and wears blue contacts in order to be a credible anti-immigration candidate. (I don't really think rounding up 75% to 100% is that big a deal but the aesthetics of looking dutch are probably pretty important to him.)

Fascinating, I always thought his skin tone was noticeably darker than the typical Dutchman.

"Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" by James Weldon Johnson is a great book-length example of that.

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