Girl Gets Spray Tan, Braids Hair. News at 11

Passing is a term used to describe the process by which blacks live out their lives as whites. Theoretically, I suppose, it could also be used to describe the analogous experience in which whites live out their lives as blacks, but it never is, no doubt because of the convention that says if you have any black blood at all, then you’re black.

If you subscribe to that convention, then I’ve been passing all my life. One of my great-grandmothers was from Nubia (now Sudan.) This was enough to qualify me for affirmative action admission to the University of California back in 1968 – an offer I turned down.

I think it would be kind of presumptuous of me to claim to be black. I was raised by a white Jewish New Yorker. I identify as a white Jewish New Yorker.

But there’s no denying that if I ever take up time travel as a hobby and end up in pre-Civil War New Orleans, I’d be fair game for the auction block. Octoroons like me, I’m told, did really, really well on the brothel circuit.

I bring this up in connection with the genuinely fascinating story of Rachel Dolezal, a civil rights activist in Eastern Washington who is the President of Spokane’s NAACP Chapter and a professor of African American studies. And white. Although for some reason, she’s been pretending for the past 10 years to be black.

My own feeling? Hey, if she wants to be black, let her be black. I don’t see this as much different than the Caitlyn Jenner saga, really. Personally, I look forward to a future in which things like ethnicity and gender will all be fashion statements.

Although, I do note a compulsion to attach my own (essentially irrelevant) autobiographical info to that opinion: I get to have an opinion here ‘cause I’m part black! You! Whitey! Shut the fuck up!

Which is very weird.

Also interesting to note that Dolezal heads the police commission that looked into the Otto Zehm homicide although I’m not sure she headed it back in 2007, or, if she did, why they're feeling a need to discredit her now. Girl gets spray tan, braids hair. Only news at 11 if, let me see… Did the Spokane police kill another unarmed man on his softa?

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In other exciting news, I finished the Breaking Barriers business plan.

And I also had this long, byzantine dream last night, whose narrative plot I can’t remember at all though I do remember floating images and storylines –

Like it took place in my very first grownup apartment over the Independent Driving School in Oakland except it didn’t look like that apartment at all, it looked like that strange labyrinthian warren of rooms that I always dream about when I dream about my “home.” And it was on the very edge of town, a ba-a-a-d neighborhood, except that the local property owners had hit upon a very weird method of gentrification: They were bussing in loads and loads of old white people to go shopping in the metal-grilled delis and botanicas. Mervin! Such a deal I get on this can of Colt 45! That kind of thing.