Ijeoma Oluo’s interview with Rachel Dolezal, in The Stranger, is today’s must-read. Yes, Dolezal is the much-discussed white woman who identifies as black. Her again?, you may find yourself thinking, but Oluo’s article goes beyond the oddities of Dolezal’s story, and gets at bigger questions about racism. The crux of the interview is when Oluo…
I have often thought that my story could only exist in America. I have a German Catholic birth mother, a birth father who is the descendent of African slaves, and I was raised by Jews with Eastern European ancestry. As a person of color, a biracial woman, and a transracial adoptee, it is a particularly…
I’ll start with an old joke. Mr. Rosenbaum enjoys cooking a steak on his outdoor barbecue grill every Friday afternoon, for his family’s Sabbath meal. But because he is the only Jew in a very Catholic neighborhood, the smell of the cooking meat drives his neighbors — who are forgoing meat on Fridays during Lent…
A few years after graduating from college, when I was living in the racially mixed Chicago suburb of Oak Park, I played pick-up basketball at the local YMCA. Among the regulars was another young white man, who habitually augmented his gym gear with knee-high tube socks striped with red, green and black, the colors of…
Jon Stewart doesn’t tape on Fridays, so the universe had to wait until Monday night to hear his insight into the Rachel Dolezal scandal, which caused the internet to implode over the weekend. In case you haven’t been following (or spent your weekend binge watching “Orange is the New Black”) : Rachel Dolezal, head of…
If we needed proof that there is no such thing as local news anymore, the case of Rachel Dolezal provided it. The story of a president of an NAACP chapter and African studies professor essentially building a career around a fabricated ethnic identity – telling the world she was of African-American heritage when she is,…
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