Showing posts with label washington. Show all posts
Showing posts with label washington. Show all posts

Sunday, January 22, 2017

The Women's March

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It was epic, it was sweeping, it was historic, and it helped millions of men, women, and children around the world get over the worst election in American history.







Will it change the fact that Donald Trump is President? No. Will it send a message to conservatives that we will not sit down and shut up and let them run the show? Yes! So at least there is hope that someone is paying attention.

From New York Mag: "Don't Let Anybody Tell You the Marches Didn't Matter
It matters that Trump drew a sparse crowd to inaugural festivities that he had billed beforehand as a historic, Jacksonian uprising of The People. And it matters much more that millions of Americans came out on a Saturday to register their protest. It is not only catharsis, though catharsis is better than depression. The message has been heard by the political class, Republican and Democratic alike.







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Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Rachel Dolezal Does the Talk Shows - Says She is "Not White"

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Previous Related Posts:
Melissa Harris-Perry Loses Her Mind Over Rachel Dolezal
Twitter Mocks Rachel Dolezal
Rachel Dolezal: Con Artist Passing as Black Causes Confusion

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Rachel Dolezal resigned from the Spokane NAACP yesterday:

Dolezal's Complete Statement from Facebook
Dear Executive Committee and NAACP Members, It is a true honor to serve in the racial and social justice movement here...
Posted by Spokane NAACP on Monday, June 15, 2015

Dolezal expressed no remorse, nor did she apologize for any deception on her part:

. . . Police brutality, biased curriculum in schools, economic disenfranchisement, health inequities, and a lack of pro-justice political representation are among the concerns at the forefront of the current administration of the Spokane NAACP.
And yet, the dialogue has unexpectedly shifted internationally to my personal identity in the context of defining race and ethnicity.
I have waited in deference while others expressed their feelings, beliefs, confusions and even conclusions - absent the full story.

So she is viewing herself as the victim of the press.


In the last 24 hours Dolezal has also drawn scrutiny to her other activities as a student, artist, college instructor and even columnist for a local Spokane newspaper. And there is probably more where all this came from!


Dolezal has been let go from Eastern Washington University where she was an African Studies Professor (or adjunct instructor - there's some disagreement).

From CBS News
Her biography has also been removed from Eastern Washington University's website. The university said her contract to teach ended this month.

The material below was captured before her biography was scrubbed from the college's website.



While a student at the traditionally black Howard University, Dolezal for discrimination - because she was white!


From the Daily Beast
The Smoking Gun reported Monday.... Dolezal accused the historically black college of improperly blocking her job as a teaching assistant, rejecting her application to be a post-graduate instructor, and denying her scholarship aid. Dolezal also claimed the university removed some of her artwork from a student exhibition because it was “motivated by a discriminatory purpose to favor African-American students over” her. An appeals court dismissed the complaint in 2004 because it found there was no evidence of discrimination.

The details are rather fascinating, via Smoking Gun
Dolezal, then known as Rachel Moore, named the university and Professor Alfred Smith as defendants in a lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C.’s Superior Court. During the pendency of the civil case, Smith was chairman of Howard’s Department of Art.

According to a Court of Appeals opinion, Dolezal's lawsuit “claimed discrimination based on race, pregnancy, family responsibilities and gender.” She alleged that Smith and other school officials improperly blocked her appointment to a teaching assistant post, rejected her application for a post-graduate instructorship, and denied her scholarship aid while she was a student.
The court opinion also noted that Dolezal claimed that the university’s decision to remove some of her artworks from a February 2001 student exhibition was “motivated by a discriminatory purpose to favor African-American students over” her.
As detailed in the court opinion, Dolezal’s lawsuit contended that Howard was “permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult.”

Judge Zoe Bush dismissed Dolezal’s complaint in February 2004, 18 months after the lawsuit was filed and Dolezal was deposed on several occasions. Bush found no evidence that Dolezal was discriminated on the basis of race or other factors. The D.C. Court of Appeals subsequently affirmed Bush’s decision.
Following the dismissal of Dolezal’s lawsuit (and the Court of Appeals decision), she was ordered to reimburse Howard for a “Bill of Costs” totaling $2728.50. During the case, she was also ordered to pay the university nearly $1000 in connection with an “obstructive and vexatious” court filing that sought to improperly delay her examination by an independent doctor.

It's fascinating that Dolezal's art was the sticking point. It has now come to light that Dolezal copied (try plagiarized) a famous painting by British artist J.M.W. Turner called "The Slave Ship" and called it her own original work. In her catalog only speaks of her own interpretation of the scene. It's audacious!



This photo of Dolezal in front of the plagiarized painting as published in TheEasternerOnline bears the caption:
Rachel Dolezal, an EWU Professor, sits on a couch at her home in front of an original painting she created. Dolezal obtained her master's in fine arts at Howard University.

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Dolezal tried to fill in some of the blanks in her "full story" by giving an interview to NBC's TODAY Show with Matt Lauer. But again there are more questions than answers as Dolezal dodged the basic question of why she has lied about her racial identity.
From TODAY
"I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon, and black curly hair," she told Lauer. But she insisted she never deceived anyone as numerous critics have suggested.
"I do take exception to that because it's a little more complex than me identifying as black or answering a question of, are you black or white?" she said.
. . . "As much as this discussion has somewhat been at my expense recently, and in a very sort of viciously inhumane way come out of the woodwork, the discussion is really about what it is to be human," she said.





From Washington Post
“I definitely am not white,” Dolezal told NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie in an excerpt of the interview which will air on “Nightly News.” “Nothing about being white describes who I am.”
. . . “I identify as black,” Dolezal told NBC’s “Today” show on Tuesday morning. “I did feel that, at some point, I would need to address the complexity of my identity.”
In a series of interviews with the network — a first since she was thrust into the national spotlight — the 37-year-old Dolezal was challenged about her race and the accusations that she had been deceptive for years.
Dolezal told Guthrie: “I am more black than I am white.”
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Monday, June 15, 2015

Melissa Harris-Perry Loses Her Mind Over Rachel Dolezal

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Previous Related Posts:
Twitter Mocks Rachel Dolezal
Rachel Dolezal: Con Artist Passing as Black Causes Confusion

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It's a strange thing that sometimes people will agree with a notorious person as long as their philosophies or narratives somehow mesh. I guess that's what is meant by "strange bedfellows" in politics.

In the case of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman posing as a black woman, things are more muddled than that.

For some reason, Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC (#nerdland) decided to defend Dolezal in an very hypothetical and even nonsensical way, using the analogy of transexuals who seek to find their "real" identity. What she avoided was any semblance of a news story with facts.

From The Root

On Saturday, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry met the ire of social media after seemingly asserting that Dolezal could actually be black, despite the fact that Dolezal’s parents have said that their background was everything but black—Czech, Swedish and German.
“Is it possible that she might actually be black?” Harris-Perry questioned.
“I want to be very careful here, because I don’t want to say it’s the equivalent of the transgender experience,” she said. “But there is a useful language in ‘trans’ and ‘cis,’ which is just to say some of us are born cisgendered and some of us are born transgendered.”



Okay, now first of all, while Harris-Perry believes that "race is a social construct," it is clearly different from judging someone's gender identity - how they perceive themselves sexually in a subjective personal way. Dolezal is by all accounts objectively lying about facts and details of her life, travels and resume. Facts are facts in the real world, and not everything is conjecture. Her real white parents know who they are. Her adopted black brother knows who she is. Other people did not know the reality of Dolezal's life, and her own spin has simply been dishonest on many levels.

What infuriated Harris-Perry's viewers was that she seemed to breeze right past the idea that Dolezal is a rampant liar, as if that wasn't relevant to the story. Harris-Perry mainly wanted to make some larger point about racial identity being a personal choice. And maybe that's true for anyone who isn't a public figure. But the fact is, Rachel Dolezal has chosen to become a public figure, a university professor, and the head of the Spokane NAACP. Someone can "pass" as anything but a public figure has to bear scrutiny by the public, and cannot just keep lying to the point of being delusional.

The real world isn't make-believe.

The following day, Harris-Perry did another segment defending her first piece, defending herself while admitting that Twitter reaction was nearly unanimous - that it was "inherently problematic" to ask if Dolezal could actually be truly black. But she kept referring to "race being policed" because it is perceived as "fixed," and that shows she was missing the point again.

Trans-activist Cherno Biko made the important point that "Dolezal made a decision to start acting, while trans-folk need to stop acting."  But Harris-Perry then had another "derp" moment:

What if she (Dolezal) is not pretending? And not Rachel in particular . . . Is it possble to be born into a body that is not an authentic expression of your racial identity? And what words that might look like?

Her panel seemed dumbfounded and stared in disbelief, and no one responded because they could tell the crazy train had left the station. When Jamelle Bouie pointed out that some racial identity is imposed, then Harris-Perry asked whether gender identity wasn't also "imposed," which is also nutty considering several people on the set with her were transexuals who had "chosen" to find their "real" identities. Truly one of the most awkward moments on a talk show I've seen in my 55 years.



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Twitter Mocks Rachel Dolezal

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Previous Related Posts:
Rachel Dolezal: Con Artist Passing as Black Causes Confusion

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Really this post could be ten pages long, so I had to pick and choose some of the best tweets about Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP leader passing as black in Spokane, WA.

The first tweet is mine, with a real quote:












































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Rachel Dolezal ~ Con-Artist Passing as Black Creates Confusion

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Racial identity in America is always a deep subject, but sometimes a story comes along that seems baffling to everyone on several different levels.

For your inspection: Rachel Dolezal, a white woman from Idaho who attended a traditionally black college then proceeded to "invent" an identity for herself as a black woman with no genetic basis in fact. Dolezal became a Black Studies professor and eventually head of the Spokane, Washington, NAACP. Of course she could have fulfilled both those roles as a white woman, but for some reason she chose to tell everyone that she was African American with a black father, had lived in South Africa, and had been the victim of hate crimes - none of which was true.

It's hard not to make Steve Martin and "The Jerk" jokes, and in fact, there have been many all over Twitter. Not to mention Jan Brady Afro jokes.











Dolezal was not born a poor black child and is definitely white. Her also-white parents had adopted African-American children and really had lived in South Africa, but apparently Dolezal never visited them there. Dolezal really did attend Howard University, but it's unclear whether the college viewed her as white, black, or mixed-race. She really is a gifted artist who chooses to paint about the African American experience, but whether her art fans knew she was white is also unclear. The NAACP obviously thought she was black, but they have come out in support of Dolezal so far.

This all came out when Dolezal's parents decided to do some interviews about their daughter. Why they waited years to discuss her strange story isn't clear, but it has hit the news and social media like a bombshell.


From People
"Rachel has chosen to distance herself from the family and be hostile towards us," her mother Ruthanne Dolezal told CNN on Friday. "She doesn't want us to be where she is, she doesn't want to be seen with us because it ruins her image."
"We are her birth parents," Lawrence Dolezal added. "We do not understand why she feels it's necessary to misrepresent her ethnicity."
Speaking from their home in Troy, Montana, the Dolezals told CNN's At This Hour that their daughter's identification as a black woman "started kind of gradually, maybe around 2007 or so."

Real Parents

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Dolezal's Real Parents interviewed on CNN



Dolezal had recently reported hate mail arriving at the Spokane NAACP, but police wondered whether it was authentic. The day after the news came out that Dolezal was "passing as black" the authorities suspended the investigation, because at this point who can believe a word she says?

From Boise Weekly
Dolezal, president of the Spokane branch of the NAACP, had previously filed multiple police reports, claiming to be the victim of threats and hate crimes. KREM-TV is reporting the SPD has halted its investigations into those claims, at least for now.

"If new information comes to light, we can investigate that information," the SPD tweeted June 12.

This past March, Dolezal told police hate mail had been found in the Spokane NAACP chapter's post office box, but police investigators stated the envelope had neither a barcode nor date stamp on the envelope, and no one at the post office was considered to be a suspect. Dolezal reported a second envelope, which included hate mail, was delivered to the NAACP's downtown Spokane office, and police were still investigating until Friday, when they announced they were suspending their probe.

Not Real Father

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A local Spokane reporter cornered Dolezal and asked her simple questions about the identity of her father, and whether she was actually black. She seemed speechless and utterly confused, and literally ran away from the reporter.

From Gawker
The reporter first asks Dolezal if her father was able to make it to Spokane this past January for a ribbon cutting event. Dolezal replies that her father did not attend the ceremony because he has bone cancer (which itself might be a lie). The reporter then presents Dolezal with an off-camera photo of her father, which leads to the following exchange:

Reporter: Is that your dad?

Dolezal: Yeah. That’s... that’s my dad.

Reporter: This man right here is your father? Right there?

Dolezal: Do you have a question about that?

Reporter: Yes, ma’am. I was wondering if, uh, your dad really is an African American man?

Dolezal: That’s a very—I mean, I don’t know what you’re implying.

Reporter: Are you African American?

Dolezal: I don’t... I don’t understand the question of—I did tell you that yes that’s my dad. And he was unable to come in January.

Reporter: Are your parents—are they white?

Dolezal: [Walking away] I refuse...






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Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Baltimore Burning Over Death of Freddie Gray

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Here we go again. On April 19, 2015, a group of policemen in Baltimore, Maryland, took custody of a man named Freddie Gray and after he was injured during the scuffle, they dragged him to an ambulance where later he died a mysterious death. Somehow he was killed inside an ambulance, completely severing his spinal cord. You cannot make up a horror story worse than the plight of African Americans in the hands of white cops these days.

From The Atlantic: The Mysterious Death of Freddie Gray
According to the city, an officer made eye contact with Gray, and he took off running, so they pursued him. Though he'd had scrapes with the law before, there's no indication he was wanted at the time. And though he was found with a switchblade, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said, “We know that having a knife is not necessarily a crime.”

The police say Gray didn't resist arrest and that officers didn't use force, which seems to be mostly corroborated by video shot by bystanders. Gray seems to shout in pain, and his leg seems injured as officers drag him to a police van. (Someone off camera shouts, "His leg broke and y'all dragging him like that!") Gray also had asthma and requested his inhaler, but didn't get it. Yet it's not the leg or the asthma that killed him. Instead, it was a grave injury to his spinal cord. Gray's family said he was treated for three fractured vertebrae and a crushed voice box, the sorts of injuries that doctors say are usually caused by serious car accidents. The van made at least two stops before reaching the police station, but there's no footage to say what happened during the journey or at those stops.

It's a baffling conundrum. "None of the officers describe any use of force," Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said. "None of the officers describe using any force against Mr. Gray." And yet somehow Gray was fatally hurt while in police custody.

Baffling conundrum, indeed.

So what has happened since Gray's death? Protest marches have sometimes turned into riots, with looting and fires, and the Governor called in the National Guard. Hashtag Baltimore is turning into another Ferguson, Missouri. Or maybe EVERYWHERE is Ferguson these days, and the country has got to get this under control! The good news is that recently sworn-in Attorney General Loretta Lynch has already sent a team to Baltimore to investigate the circumstances. Which is fine, but at some point there has to be justice for black Americans who are scared for their lives and for their children.















































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Friday, May 16, 2014

#OperationAmericanSpring ~ Here Comes Crazy ~ No Overthrow But Lots of Wicked Jokes

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Previous Related Posts:
Operation American Spring ~ Where is Everyone?
There's a Full Moon - Time for the Lunacy of Operation American Spring

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Operation American Spring was slow to get off the ground, but now they are fired up. And yet, this isn't the most organized revolution we've seen.

The Crowd was something like
Cocoon Meets Tim Burton's Dark Shadows











Veteran screaming about Benghazi!!!

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Where're You At???



















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