Before Rachel Dolezal gets fired or ostracized...

[Igel]

16. Some people get a pass.

Mostly those whose reps really don't depend on the lies.

I have no idea who David Barton is. But he doesn't touch any hot topics in American politics, and from a cursorily glimpse at Wikipedia they're irrelevant to what he is and how he got there.

Dolezhal is more akin to the U. Colorado professor or Warren who claimed to be more Native American than they were. While Warren allegedly benefited from her status--something I honestly don't know or case about--Ward Churchill, however, seriously did benefit and leveraged it into a fraudulent career. The "smallpox blankets" canard is pretty much his baby. Even the incident he refers to along the Mississippi was taken rather wildly out of context, and only a desire to believe the story kept people from looking at the actual records ... which didn't agree with Churchill. Helping to confirm this was the use of making the claim under a pseudonym, which he then was able to confirm. Voila: Two sources agree, that's enough for most "I wanna believe" people.

There was also the anti-gun advocate's research that turned out to be, um, wrong. But widely accepted for a while. Not because of his great research methodology, but because it was useful research.

Those matter a great deal more than O'Reilley, Barton (whose work, apparently, was retracted as well and who was punished in a sense, just not by "his own&quot , Warren, or Dolezal.

However, O'Reilley and Barton touch upon the right/left divide. They must be punished to the greatest extent possible, all the more so if any of ours is.

And Dolezal dares, from what I've read in some posts, to usurp in the most uppity way possible a black identity that she didn't earn and doesn't deserve. While black Americans passing as white happens, a white American passing as black seems to undermine a crucial bit of a counter-narrative and that undermining has to be explained away.

I don't much care about Dolezal. I do find the negative reactions to her intriguing, though--there are a number of them, and trying to sort out the basis for them is fascinating. In some cases there's almost a genetic identicalness between culture and race; in another, blackness is a worldwide thing and all blacks have some cultural traits that make them unique and special; in others, there's like a badge to be earned, a pride that cannot be shared. With the need to derogate her that speaks more to the writer than it does to Dolezalova. (Then again, many African-Americans that assimilate to "whiteness" are also derogated, so there is symmetry--not a pleasant symmetry, mind you.)