It's All Black and White, Except When It Isn't

I just told you that the whole Rachel Dolezal story was going to keep giving gifts in the form of columns, and I was right.

I had heard that Carly Fiorina was going to be a guest on "The View" this past Tuesday, that odd collection of women led by the black celebrity Whoopi Goldberg, who sit and talk about things five times a week on ABC.  I tuned in a few minutes before the scheduled Carly-time, and the five women were finishing a conversation about, you guessed it, Rachel Dolezal.

Remember that I said that the left would tie themselves in knots trying to decide what to make of our Rachel?  Well, Whoopi, who is certainly over there on the left, decided that it was perfectly fine for Rachel to decide that she "felt black."

I'd like to know if I were to "feel tall", whether Whoopi would go along with that?

But I digress.

There is a part of what Whoopi said that I have no trouble with. If Rachel Dolezal, of only German, Swedish and Czech extraction, wants to run around acting black, well, sweetie, you just have at it.  The rest of us just get called bigots when we try to define anything as being associated with blackness, so if you want to tan your skin, screw up your hair and listen to rap, well, whatever trips your trigger.  It's a free country.

But here's where I would love to hear the exchange if we were to seat Whoopi next to Rachel Dolezal and have Whoopi answer the following question honestly:

"Whoopi, you are sitting next to Rachel Dolezal, who is not one corpuscle black, but who has portrayed herself as black, got into a black college, works for the NAACP, tanned herself and adopted a black hairdo.  You said, on this show, that you are explicitly OK with her doing all that.  So what happens when you, or your daughter or brother or sister loses out on a job, or a college admission that was based on racial preference, to Rachel Dolezal, or to anyone else whose only claim to blackness is that she "feels black"?

And that, friends, is what is wrong with affirmative action and other racial preference in schools, employment and congressional redistricting.  Because no sooner than people become the gender they always wanted to be, others will try to become the racial type they always wanted to be, just like Rachel Dolezal. Since the preferences were put into place to address past injustices, then who actually is entitled to seek redress of those perceived injustices today by taking advantage of those preferences?

All of those lovely programs meant to address racial injustices of decades past will provide benefits not only to those who never experienced those injustices (e.g., the first-generation American Barack Obama getting into Harvard Law, five years after graduating college without accomplishment as an undergrad but having the right skin color), but those who, like Rachel Dolezal, aren't really even members of the racial type they claim to be!

Is this actually the last straw in the extreme that says you can be anything you call yourself?  Because if we simply are what we feel like, then it is absolutely time to divest ourselves of the burdens of racial preferences, of pernicious "cures" like affirmative action, of the must-interview-a-black-coaching-candidate "Rooney Rule" in the NFL.

We are all one, big happy family, this human race of ours, and we can just choose to be anything we want to be.  Hey, I have one -- who gets arrested if a white guy who says he feels black has a fight with a black guy who pulls the Michael Jackson thing and claims to be white?  Whose civil rights are violated?  Who gets to play the race card?

Oh, this is so much fun.  I can't wait for the Comments to fill up below.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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