Jonathan Warner @JonathanRWarner 21 hours ago
London Young Labour chair took BME spot at LGBT conference because his dad’s girlfriend was black.Christ…
Why are you currently occupying the Black member’s position when you do not have an experience of oppression on the basis that you are Black?
The open letter is from 2012 but the tweet is from yesterday. The question is a live one.
Comments
8 responses to “Self-defining”
(pet hate)
No, it doesn’t beg the question. That’s not what begging the question means. *grumble*
(/pet hate)
I hate that too. That’s not just a prescriptivist grumble, “begging the question” is a technical term and needs to retain the technical meaning.
He should just identify as a woman, then they wouldn’t question his right to take the woman’s slot.
Nonsense, you can’t have technical terms retaining their meaning… if you did you’d be stomping on someone’s intersectional personal identity that they demand you validate.
What. The. Fuck?
Well, although it seems stupid to have a non-black black delegate I’d say Mr Butterworth has a couple of justifications.
First, anybody can self-identify as anything. Although you’ll probably not be amazed to learn that my self-identifying as a fork-lift truck has not made shifting our old cooker any easier.
Second, there is no limit indicated on descent. There’s excellent evidence that the cradle of mankind was on the plains of Africa so go back far enough and Bob’s your uncle – or more pertinently, Lucy is your great-great-great-….. -great grandmother.
In loose connection to what Samantha Vimes and James Howde say, I want to redirect some attention again to this great – and unfortunately largely overlooked – essay by Adolph Reed Jr., which was published last year during the whole Rachel Dolezal “affair”.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/15/jenner-dolezal-one-trans-good-other-not-so-much
By their own definition, a Korean or Tibetan could be ‘legitimately’ Black, but an Australian couldn’t?
PS: I DO realize the in Britain, ‘Asian’ is shorthand for ‘South Asian’ e.g. Pakistani, Indian, Sri Lankan etc. Still, the parceling out of sinecures is inevitably going to bring out the Dolezals.