Monday, September 14, 2015

Me So Phony


First Rachel Dolezal pretended to be black. Then Shaun King gave one of the vaguest answers ever to questions about his ethnic background. (His mother told him all about the affair she had with a black man who fathered him/He would never ask his mom personal questions. EVERYBODY talked about who his father was when he was growing up/Until this week, in 35 years NO ONE has ever asked who his father was. HUH?) Now this loser, Michael Derrick Hudson, posed as a Chinese man to get a poem he'd written published in the 2015 edition of Best American Poetry. And to top it off, he used a woman's name -- Yi-Fen Chou, which actually means "a piece of stink." What is wrong with people? Are some whites really so convinced the system is rigged in favor of minorities, just because a small fraction of them earn some kind of recognition? Read HERE.

11 comments:

dah-veh' said...

Re: Shaun King. You consider this "one of the vaguest answers ever to questions about his ethnic background?" Wow. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/20/1413881/-Race-love-hate-and-me-A-distinctly-American-story

Kenneth M. Walsh said...

That's what I'm talking about. In the same piece he writes:

After that day when I was first asked if I was mixed, while I was still a very young child, kids and their well-intentioned parents began telling me they knew who my black father was, that I was so and so’s cousin, etc. This was in small-town Versailles, Kentucky, in the 1980s.

AND

Until this past week, never has anyone asked me who my father was during these 35 years of mine.

I'm not saying he's a liar, it's just these inconsistencies -- and others in the piece -- are head-scratchers.

dah-veh' said...

I think his accounting is credible, compelling and corroborated. Our lives are not always tidy little boxes. Perhaps DNA testing could allay your skepticism. 8-)

Kenneth M. Walsh said...

Naw, I just think he needs to learn how to express himself more clearly ... or to get a better editor. :-)

dah-veh' said...

Edited version: When she was young, my mom had non-marital sex with a black man which resulted in my birth. Que?

More to the point:

"Not one person behind these reports has remotely good intentions—quite the opposite, in fact."

Kenneth M. Walsh said...

Huh?

He has only himself to blame for choosing to respond to these ill-intentioned people with a poorly written explanation in which he contradicts himself, which only raised more questions.

dah-veh' said...

And yet you seem content to insinuate that Mr. King is a "phony," a "pretender," and a "loser" seeking to take advantage of a rigged system for his personal favor.

How does that make you any different than Breitbart, Beck and their ilk?

Kenneth M. Walsh said...

Yes, that's right. You win. Congrats!

Damian said...

As somebody with no stake in the matter, and who is certainly inclined reflexively to be sympathetic both to Mr. King and the causes for which he advocates, as well as has no use for his rightwing critics or their motives, I have to admit that the otherwise candid and revealing piece he authored left me as many questions as it answered, and took an overly --perhaps even calculatedly -- defensive posture. While he owes neither me nor anybody else an explanation, once he deigns to do so, he simultaneously claims that nobody had ever questioned his parentage until now, and that he had never broached the topic with his mother, but opened by saying for "most of" his life he'd been told that his actual father was black, which seems at odds with his closing refutations. He acknowledges that, despite the uncertainty of his situation and environment, identifying solely as black, from his teens onward, is both an oversimplification of the matter, as well as reactionary -- this is what onlookers, even benign or otherwise, have had difficulty grasping.

Nevertheless, rather than simply personalize the matter, it's probably best used just as an entree to discussing how our society still struggles how to approach multiracial people -- even seven years after electing one as our prez.

Accordingly, such ambiguity can (speciously or otherwise) offer ammunition to self-appointed opponents to what they imagine is "affirmative action" run amuck. Oh, and while lumping these recent cases from the headlines together is a conversational blogging device, it's worth noting the entry only describes specifically Hudson as a "loser" -- and the linked NPR piece is certainly similarly scathing of his deception.

Mark said...

Kenny: dah-veh seems to be well-intentioned but is conflating the Shaun King situation with Obama birthers. Both are racist and wrong, and neither of these men should have ever had to answer questions to anyone about who they are. (Well, I guess all candidates for U.S. president have background checks done on them, but that should have been the end of it for Obama.)

Where this is different is that once President Obama gave in to the racists -- by releasing his birth certificate -- the lunatics continued to say he wasn't born in the U.S. and harass him.

King, on the other hand, also chose to address the nuts, only his response included discrepancies.

Did he discuss the affair with his mother or not?
Did he grow up with numerous people asking/talking about his father, or has he never been asked once in 35 years?

Wanting to know which account is correct isn't racist, it's good journalism.

Also, the piece does not call King a "phony," "pretender" or "loser." It explicitly says Rachael Dolezal "pretended" to be black and calls the subject of the blog post -- Michael Derrick Hudson -- a "phony" and a "loser." King appears to have been included in the post because questions about his race have also been raised and his answer is imprecise.

Again, if you're saying the question should have never been raised in the first place, I don't think any sane person would disagree. But if you're going to go to the trouble of addressing a bunch of idiots, shouldn't you answer it coherently?

Too Embarrassed to Sign My Name said...

"Are some whites really so convinced the system is rigged in favor of minorities, just because a small fraction of them earn some kind of recognition?"

By virtue of the fact that we are even here discussing this man and previous people who have gamed the race system, it would suggest that there is some truth that the system is rigged. Is anyone really surprised that lowering standards for certain physical attributes, and sometimes even monetizing it, that it could lead to this type of corruption?