#Kendiism

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Bertrand Cooper

Published: Jun 19, 2023

Most of my colleagues are college-educated. I am often the only product of felons, addicts, and foster care whom my peers have encountered outside of time spent volunteering in homeless shelters and group homes. Over the years, whenever affirmative action in higher education has come under threat, these folks have offered their sympathies. They believe that I—a child of a Black father and white mother who grew up in poverty and instability—feel the attacks more acutely. Most Americans seem to think affirmative action sits at the foundation of some beneficent suite of education policies that do something significant for poor Black kids, and that would disappear without the sanction of affirmative action. But the reality is that for the Black poor, a world without affirmative action is just the world as it is—no different than before.

In 2012, 6 percent of Harvard’s freshmen identified as Black. At the time, Black Americans made up 14 percent of the population and 15 percent of the country’s young adults. Harvard was then a far cry from racial parity. But in just three years, the university increased the number of Black freshmen by 50 percent. By 2020, The Harvard Crimson was reporting that more than 15 percent of incoming freshmen were Black, which meant the university had acquired perfect representation. This progress—Black progress—appears poised to recede with the expected loss of affirmative action due to the Supreme Court’s coming decisions on the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina cases. But to endure a loss, one must have first enjoyed a gain. Diversity at Harvard was not the result of some intricate system for sourcing talent from the whole of Black America. With the permissions granted in 1978’s Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Harvard used race-conscious admissions to saturate itself with students drawn from the highest-earning segments of Black America.

The same year that Harvard achieved perfect Black representation, a group of celebrated economists published a study examining income segregation across America’s colleges.

From 1999 to 2004, the years examined by the study, about 16 to 18 percent of American children were living below the federal poverty line. Families living below the FPL struggle to afford enough food, clothing, or shelter to stave off biological decline. In the absence of income segregation, children from poverty would make up a proportional 16 to 18 percent of college students. But according to the study, only 3 percent of the students at Harvard in that time period came from families in the bottom 20 percent. (The researchers later found that the percentage had increased to about 5 percent for a cohort of students at Harvard from 2008 to 2013.)

In October of 2020, Harvard reported 154 Black first-year students. Given that the child-poverty rate in Black America hovers north of 30 percent, in an equitable society, some 40 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The income segregation study did not disaggregate income brackets by race, and neither does Harvard, but the university does disclose that about a quarter of its latest freshman class comes from families with incomes below $85,000, its threshold for full financial aid. This is far above the federal poverty line and therefore not a good indicator of how many poor students attend Harvard. But if we extrapolate the study's findings, only seven or eight of said 154 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The other 140 or so Black students at Harvard were likely raised outside of poverty and probably as far from the bottom as any Black child can hope to be.

Writing in the American Journal of Education in 2007, the Princeton sociology professor Douglas Massey observed that 40 percent of Black students in the Ivy League were first- or second-generation immigrants. Black immigrants are the highest-earning and best-educated subset of Black America.

The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., a director of the university’s African American–studies center, once estimated that as many as two-thirds of Harvard’s Black students in the early 2000s were the fortunate sons and daughters of Black immigrants or, to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. A Black woman who was a Harvard senior at the time told The New York Times in 2004 that there were so few other Black students whose grandparents had been born in the U.S. that they had begun calling themselves “the descendants.”

The Supreme Court affirmed race to be an acceptable criterion within a holistic admissions framework in 1978. The regime described here persisted for 45 years without manifesting any progress of note for the Black poor, and it strains faith to imagine that the trickle-down was on its way in year 46. The coming eulogies for affirmative action should acknowledge this history. No policy that hesitates to say class prioritizes the impoverished, and the people we do nothing for should at least enjoy public acknowledgment of their abandonment.

When I was in elementary school, my grandmother told me that I would go to college for free because I was Native American. I’m not Native. Rather, my father is from a light-skinned Black family, and for a long time, families like these presented sharp cheekbones and aquiline noses as evidence of Native roots. In nearly every case, it was plain white ancestry, but Black folks had been denied the supposed dignity of whiteness for so long that even those who had it did not want it. My dad told the Native fiction to my mom, and she told my grandmother, who was white working poor, and her fictions met with my father’s. Like many in her class, she believed that the government was in the business of giving gifts to everyone but poor whites. In her view, the world worked like this: Asian Americans received loans to start businesses. Hospitals gave free medical care to Hispanic children. Native Americans enjoyed juiced-up welfare and free college. Black Americans received preferential hiring and a free education. Because she believed me to be both Black and Native, college appeared to be a given.

My grandmother’s understanding of how college entry worked for Black Americans was shaped by decades of white-poor hearsay about affirmative action. She had no Black friends; ethnic gossip and popular culture were all she had to go on, and these gave her a wildly inaccurate view of what was to be my college experience. But I have found that even wealthier and more sophisticated Americans have absorbed similar fictions.

According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, out of 153,000 Black test-takers in 2005, only about 1,200 scored a 700 or above on either section of the SAT. I was among that handful. Unlike the stories my grandmother told me, a red carpet wasn’t rolled out in front of me. The guidance counselor at my New Jersey public high school said nothing about my test scores and was similarly apathetic when I said I was not going to apply to college at all. When I came back a week later to recant after my father threatened to throw me on the streets if I didn’t apply, my counselor—rather than hand me a blank check from the office of affirmative action—handed me a thin packet about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

Being a former foster youth with a missing mother and a father only just released from prison, I was legally eligible for quite a bit of aid via the FAFSA. But without legal documentation of my situation, which no adult around me had kept, acquiring that aid would require me to obtain signed statements from members of the community testifying to my fractured living conditions. As a transient youth suddenly crashing with a father I had known for barely two years and residing in an entirely new town, there was no community to vouch for me. Unable to meet the federal requirements, I slogged through an associate’s, a bachelor’s, and eventually a master’s degree, accruing substantial loans despite eligibility for grants that could have paid for my entire undergraduate education.

Since 2018, I have used what I learned (albeit too late) to help my foster sister navigate college and the FAFSA, which must be renewed every year (including resubmitting community testimony on official letterhead). On more than one occasion, she has been selected for “additional verification,” one of several variations of bureaucratic rigmarole that can result in the delay of aid long enough to force lower-income students to miss a semester if they cannot afford to pay tuition out of pocket. Even when you’re prepared for this, as she and I were, the delay is demoralizing.

Every poor kid with aspirations of college faces a slightly different constellation of obstacles, but those differences abate beneath a homogenous disappointment. The National Center for Education Statistics found that, in 2012, just 14 percent of low-income high-school students  obtained a bachelor’s or higher degree within eight years of high-school graduation. Rates of college attendance specifically among Black youth and kids below the federal poverty line—the lowest of low-income—are lower still. Given that the rate for foster or homeless youth is a meager 2 to 11 percent, it’s safe to assume that the one for Black fosters is effectively zero. Meanwhile, compiling data scattered across publications, I’ve calculated that 85 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black students go to Black folks raised in the middle and upper classes. For daily life, the result is this: In any office—in any room—where a bachelor’s degree is a prerequisite, the odds that the person next to you has come from poverty, especially Black poverty, are staggeringly low.

Affirmative-action policies are not directly responsible for the impediments that poor Black students face in higher education. Nevertheless, those policies have existed for nearly five decades and have demonstrably not been an obstacle to the formation of a status quo in which so few poor Black Americans obtain a bachelor’s degree. Although that might be viewed as a policy failure, the oral arguments in the Supreme Court cases make this much clear: Affirmative action is not intended to combat the barriers faced by the poor, Black or otherwise. It is meant to achieve racial diversity. Where it finds the bodies does not matter.

In the case of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, all parties involved—the justices, the petitioners, and the respondents—agree that the intention of affirmative action is to produce the “educational benefits of diversity.” As described by Seth Waxman, the respondent on behalf of Harvard, “a university student body comprising a multiplicity of backgrounds, experiences, and interests vitally benefits our nation. Stereotypes are broken down, prejudice is reduced, and critical thinking and problem-solving skills are improved.” The contention of Students for Fair Admissions is that Harvard could use other metrics, particularly socioeconomic status, to achieve educationally significant diversity without the need for racial considerations.

In response to the SFFA plan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that weighting factors such as class in admissions amounts to “subterfuges” for reaching some sort of “diversity in race.” She probed the lawyers in oral arguments by saying that she did not “understand why considering race as one factor but not the sole factor is any different than using any of those other metrics.” The view that Sotomayor lays out here asserts that considering income and wealth, or considering them in conjunction with race, is just a tedious path to the same outcome achieved by considering race alone. But of course, an admissions scheme that considers class would not just be a subterfuge. Even if it yielded a student body with the same degree of racial diversity, the students themselves would be very different.

Many Americans retain a certain dissonance about class, believing simultaneously that it does and does not matter. Would a classroom with one Black student who was raised by parents who met while studying business at Yale benefit from the added diversity of a Black student who was raised in the Cuney Homes projects that produced George Floyd? You would be hard-pressed to find someone who answers “no,” and it is doubtful that Sotomayor would either. But the only way to promote the admission of these two hypothetical Black students is with policies that recognize both class and race. Unfortunately, conversations about diversity too often focus solely on the gaps between Black and white Americans, excluding entirely the issue of class divides among Black Americans.

In 2018, William Julius Wilson—a survivor of Jim Crow and a pioneer in the study of urban poverty—reported that Black Americans had the highest degree of residential income segregation of any racial group: Our top and bottom classes were then the least likely to live alongside each other. That same year, Pew Research Center released a study on income inequality within races. From 1970 to 2016, the top 10 percent of Black workers earned nearly 10 times what the bottom 10 percent of black workers did. For nearly 50 years, Black Americans experienced more income disparity than any other racial group in the country. The report received widespread coverage, including in The Atlantic, but mainly for its findings regarding Asian Americans, who had (temporarily) displaced Black Americans as the least equal group.

I can only cheer on, and envy, the speed at which knowledge of class disparities among Asian Americans has permeated popular culture. I hope it continues, because the Asian parity that Harvard has achieved is certainly not the result of admitting impoverished Burmese Americans. In the time since the 2018 Pew study was released, we have seen not just class-focused journalism, but Always Be My Maybe, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Beef. Each pop-cultural work  demonstrates not just that class exists for Asians, but that it drastically alters their lives, their opportunities, and their interactions in ways that—shockingly—mirror how class affects white Americans.

That no similar awareness is burgeoning on behalf of disparities afflicting Black Americans is absurd. The fact that the white upper class had a median wealth more than 20 times that of the white poor helped fuel Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a socialist revival among white youth that continues today. In 2015, the Black upper class had a median wealth 1,382 times greater than the Black poor, along with an incarceration rate nearly 10 times lower than what I inherited. Yet still, some of the best-educated minds in the country claim to not understand how taking this into consideration might yield a qualitatively different student body than what comes from treating Black Americans as a class-free blob.

Powerful as they may be, elite institutions require support from the ground. The social prestige that achieving racial diversity offers and the ability it has to smooth over the appearance of other inequities are too alluring for a university like Harvard to pass up. But, rich as it is, Harvard does not have the capital necessary to employ all of the country’s poor, fix their neighborhoods, and fund their public schools, or the willingness to wait an entire generation for those social changes to generate a cohort of low-income children who are nevertheless academically excellent. It will always be cheaper and more expedient to simply recruit wealthy kids instead. If what comes after affirmative action penalizes the Black middle and upper classes, that is nothing to celebrate. But if we want to erect something that benefits all Black Americans, we cannot expect that to happen without policies that treat class as meaningful.

[ Via: https://archive.is/BimyF ]

==

Affirmative action is a perfect example of a Kendiian "antiracist" policy: instituting racism into the admissions system, while benefiting the elite class.

[arcticdementor]

A few days ago I typed into Google (with quotes around my question to require an exact match):

“Do whites have civil rights?”

To my surprise, Google asserted in response that nobody had ever asked that precise question before in the history of the internet.

Today, Google lists my blog post asking that question, but only after announcing:

It looks like these results are changing quickly

If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources

In other words, Steve Sailer is not a reliable source, so hopefully somebody less deplorable will soon post this text string, but until then we’re stuck featuring Sailer’s impertinent question at the top of our results. But we at Google want you to know that we are not at all happy about it.

Or something like that.

…

This got me thinking about how the Supreme Court could play a role in saving the United States of America from breaking apart due to the surging tide of antiwhite racist hate emanating from many of its most powerful institutions.

Keep in mind that there is no way to divide the U.S. up geographically that will cure what ails us. Fortunately, we still have a fundamental Constitutional framework of “equal protection of the laws” that can be restored to turn the power of the state away from fomenting discrimination against whites and toward preventing it, just as it was used more than a half century ago against discrimination against blacks.

…

That’s true, but…here’s the thing: Technically, the Constitution hasn’t been abrogated in favor of the theories of Prof. Ibram X. Kendi. The Supreme Court can reinstate Constitutional principles such as equal protection whenever it chooses.

So, I am going to list a series of principles and actions that could help hold the country together peacefully. I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to engage in extended legal argumentation in support of them. You can hire lawyers to do that.

Many of these ideas are existing law, but have largely been forgotten. It is time for the Supreme Court to restate them in no uncertain terms.

And some of my proposals are not yet law but can be made so by judicial fiat.

The first principle must be that whites have civil rights. All antidiscrimination laws must protect whites as fully as nonwhites. The courts must articulate explicitly that whites are a protected class, same as any other race.

…

Rationalizations such as “We are not attacking white people per se, just whiteness” must be laughed out of court as feebleminded excuses for race-based hate. To use schools and workplaces to attack whiteness is to attack whites for their race, which is against the law.

All legal reasoning based on the assumption of a permanent, unassailable, invulnerable white ruling majority is obsolete and must be dropped.

The Supreme Court should announce that the era of it permitting violations of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by tolerating discrimination against whites is coming to a close.

The Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision purportedly outlawed racial quotas, but legalized racial “goals” so long as they weren’t called “quotas.”

Importantly, Sandra Day O’Connor’s controlling decision in the 2003 Grutter case that temporarily legalized affirmative action came with a 25-year time limit.

Now 18 of those 25 years have gone by. The court should announce that racial preferences will, as scheduled, terminate in 2028, the 50th anniversary of Bakke.

Of course, by 2028 blacks will not be performing the same on average as whites. More blacks will be NFL cornerbacks and more whites will be hard-science Nobel laureates. The effects of 70,000 years of largely separate cultural and genetic evolution will not disappear soon. But 2028 will be the 60th year of explicit affirmative action in violation of the Constitution. Sixty years is enough. The country can’t survive 70,000 more years.

A good guide for the Supreme Court is to find ways to reject the edicts of Kendiism, such as that “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” But two wrongs don’t make a right.

The increasingly popular belief that whites alive today deserve to be punished for the sins of dead whites in centuries past must be denounced forthrightly as a violation of basic principles of the Constitution such as the ban on bills of attainder. Taxpayer-funded programs to demonize and demoralize innocent white children as vengeance for the sins of long-gone co-ethnics is not only unconstitutional but wicked.

Judges should enunciate that arguments over whether one is punching down (bad) or punching up (good) are irrelevant. Punching is against the law.

The mantra “Diversity is our strength,” as Dan Quayle claimed, is not part of the Constitution. Instead, it is an empirical assertion that must be subjected to strict scrutiny when it is offered as an excuse for racial discrimination.

Ours is a system of limited government. Equal protection of the laws refers to the operation of the laws, not to the outcomes of the cosmos. Equal protection does not mean that all are assured equal net worths.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

John McWhorter: The Anti-Science Attitude of the Intolerant Orthodoxy

This is Trofim Lysenko.

Following Stalin’s failed efforts to collectivize agricultural production, causing between 7 and 14 million people to starve to death, the geneticist Lysenko claimed he had the answers to mass produce crops to make it work. Lysenko threw out the established science of the West, dismissing it because it allowed too much of a role to individual actors, contrary to the focus of Communist ideology.

Lysenko told Soviet leadership exactly what they wanted to hear; and as a former peasant and member of the Communist Party, he was exactly who they wanted to hear it from. After gaining the personal support of Stalin, scientists critical of Lysenko were purged and imprisoned as Lysenkoism became state-sanctioned doctrine.

But no matter how much the Soviets wanted Lysenko’s pseudoscience to be true, it wasn​​’t. Famines caused by instituting Lysenko’s theories killed tens-of-millions of people across the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

Ideology twisting scholarship with dangerous consequences is a phenomenon hardly limited to the Soviet Union, it’s happening here, right now, in America in an effort to spread an intolerant orthodoxy masquerading as “antiracism.”

Take the orthodoxy that microaggressions are a grinding problem for black Americans, exerting significant psychological damage upon us.

Nevermind that the academic “literature” undergirding microaggressions is full of holes. It’s based on tiny sample sizes, is never replicated, It ignores the legions of black people surveyed who deny that acts labeled as microaggressions actually bother them, and it doesn’t show that supposed microaggressions correlate with racist sentiment of any kind.

Or take the orthodoxy that every workplace needs a diversity, equity, and inclusion program that teaches people to be more aware of racial differences. Nevermind that scientific surveys show such programs neither further diversify the workplace nor foster interethnic harmony, and in fact, if anything, increase interethnic conflict.

And the “implicit bias” testing often used to justify such programs, which purports to measure people’s subconscious racism, has been demonstrated by psychologists to have low reliability and weak predictors of real world discrimination.

And there’s the orthodoxy that all discrepancies between the races must be because of “systemic racism.” This idea with only the vaguest notion of what a “system” even is is presented as if it were “science”, but it’s quite simply anti-science. It flies in the face of how hard people work to master fields like psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history to explain discrepancies in more nuanced ways.

Of course, believers in the intolerant orthodoxy are not exerting the degree of physical violence and assassinations that Stalinists exerted to enforce Lysenkoism. My comparison is of the relevant frames of mind. However, the intolerant orthodoxy is indeed doing great harm to our society.

If we want to heal the racial divisions in our nation, we need real science and scholarship not twisted by ideology. The Soviets couldn’t feed their people simply by wanting Lysenkoism to be true, and their rigid ideology and purging of opponents prevented them from finding answers that didn’t cause more harm than good.

Believing that being more race conscious in all aspects of our lives can cure our ills won’t make it so. But if we’re willing to open our mind beyond the ideas that are presently popular, we might just be able to find what will.

I’m John McWhorter. For more, read my book “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America,” and join me at FairForAll.org.

==

Quack “scholarship,” such as Kendiism, DiAngeloism and the “Microaggressions” paper by Derald Wing Sue are the modern equivalents of phrenology. They do more harm than good because they don’t substantiate their claims and aren’t based on anything empirical, so aren’t aligned with reality.

Their ideologies might be best understood as demands to cure Demon Possession.

You might well ask, “okay, back up a bit - how do you know it’s Demon Possession?” And you would likely be told, “because they’re unwell.” And you might well ask, “that’s it, because they’re unwell? Do you even know what they have?” And you might be told, “we already know what they have, it’s Demon Possession.” You might respond, “but these people obviously have schizophrenia, while these people over here just have the flu.” And you could be told, “no, they’re possessed by Demons.” And you might suggest, “but we should be looking at what each of them has and treating that.” To which you might be told, “that doesn’t solve Demon Possession, what’s wrong with you that you don’t want to get rid of the Demons and have to deflect away from the most important thing, the critical task of exorcising the Demons? We know the Demons are there because they’re unwell. What are you, a Demon Worshiper?”

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Implementation of Kendiism directly created a totalitarian, fascistic state within Boston University.

This is the natural course of Kendiism, when it get a foothold.

Hopefully this will give Boston University cause to rip this toxic, authoritarian ideology out by the roots.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

What is your opinion on transracial people?

From what I've read, it's hard to tell what they're actually doing, so this is probably going to resemble more of a stream of thought than any solid conclusions.

-

There seems to be two types.

Firstly, there's people who just simply lie. Skin tone is no indication of anything; people with strong European ancestry vary from very pale to quite tanned, while those with strong African ancestry vary from very dark to, again, a more tanned complexion. There's similar variability across other regions like South America and Asia.

Something of a cultural trope reflective of the pre- and nascent-Civil Rights Era is the black parents who "lucked out" and had a "white passing" child, who has the benefit of attending the "white" school, and the drama then spins off from there.

More recently, there's been a number of people passing themselves off as black or native American. Rachel Dolezal, for example.

It's hard not to notice that they wouldn't do this if not for access to some tangible benefit, one might even say "privilege." Henry Rogers (aka Ibram X. Kendi) hilariously blew up his entire career hustle with one tweet over this same topic.

It's a reflection of opportunity, taken advantage of by opportunists, in order to obtain prestige, notability, influence, or gain access to benefits not normally afforded to them. The question one might well ask is why these separate benefits exist in the first place, which might give someone reason to seek access to them.

-

Then there's the people who "Identify" out of one category into another. We should note, of course, that the social constructivists don't acknowledge race categories themselves as a social construct, as humans are all one species, just different tones and shades of brown.

I don't really understand whether these people are asserting a dysphoric or dysmorphic phenomenon in effect here, or something more like cultural affinity.

-

At face value, it seems like they're saying that the way I feel about myself, the way I experience life and the world doesn't correspond to the way anyone with my skin color feels about themselves/experiences life/experiences the world, and it corresponds only to the way someone with a different color skin feels about themselves/experiences life/experiences the world.

How could anyone ever claim to know that? Other than through the usual woke mainstay of gross stereotypes? The collectivist, intersectional nonsense that we see permeating their beliefs, that we experience the world through categories, and everyone in a category shares the same experience or shared identity. Or is supposed to.

How could you ever pretend to know that what you feel/experience as a black person is not the way black people feel/experience, but the way white people feel/experience? Or vice versa? What is the black identity? What is the white identity? Or brown? Or mixed?

What happened to the lessons of every family sitcom from the 90s?

This stereotyping - and that's what it is - and hivemind mentality is the natural result of Kendiism/DiAngeloism and the ideologies of all those race grifters being shoved down our throats. And being taken as anything more than an insane, racist joke.

With that in mind, it's conceivable that you could be a black person who has been told they'll always be oppressed and that your success is dependent on white people using their "privilege" on your behalf, because you can't, or lowering standards because it's assumed you can't meet them, feels disconnected from this and might identify more strongly with the group with more agency, the one that's empowered rather than disempowered. Or you could be a white person who has been told that "all white people are racist," are responsible for all the evil in the world and they have to just sit there in their discomfort and apologize and feel bad for crimes they didn't commit and invisible forces they can't see, who feels similarly detached from this group collective.

Are any of these things actually true? No, they're not. But if you hear them often enough, if you're dragged into "diversity, equity and inclusion" struggle sessions enough, if you're surrounded by it, admonished to believe it as a moral imperative, if your school, college, place of work and even government are adopting it, you might just develop something comparable to dysphoria in the pseudo-reality you've succumbed to. I can totally see that as a possibility.

These ideologies deliberately don't provide an individual "out." "Well, I'm not oppressed." That's because you have internalized oppression. "I'm not a racist." That denial is fragility and proves you're a racist. You might find yourself thinking that you don't see yourself in the purported "black identity" or "white identity" and you feel your skin color doesn't match your how you're supposed to "identify."

Of course, the mistake would be in accepting this ideological crap in the first place, rather than sticking with your individuality and telling the woke neoracists to fuck the hell off.

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As I said, the other way I can see this is as cultural affinity. That certain forms of expression, creativity, traditions, etc, resonate beyond racial lines.

The problem is that we are reliably scolded that some people "own" culture, and being so presumptuous as to join in is "cultural appropriation."

Culture is something you do. Not something you own or have or possess. Without people to do it, any given culture ceases. It's traditions, customs, norms, from cooking food to all those little shortcuts in interactions. There's body language, sounds - not even entire words - that Americans can invoke or share that other Americans instinctively understand which non-Americans would miss or not comprehend. Those things don't travel by skin color or through DNA.

There's a man I work with who is from and in South Africa. He grew up there, did compulsory military service, etc. He’s white. He's more culturally "African" - to the extent "African" is even a culture - than Oprah Winfrey.

Any black American who's the descendant of African slaves is culturally American, and no more culturally Zimbabwean than they are culturally Martian. They grew up in America, surrounded by American traditions, customs, norms. They may choose to embrace their ancestral Zimbabwean culture, but that in itself is an American participating in Zimbabwean culture, not a culture they already have a "right" to.

Since it’s something you participate in, culture changes all the time, because what people do and how they do it changes. It’s not a defined box of someone’s personal preconceptions that must be protected at all costs. When people discard a tradition, it’s not for you to decide that they shouldn’t, or that it ruins their culture, or that their culture has been destroyed by not complying with your expectations.

Nobody owns culture.

Not only do cultures change over time, but one of the key points about culture is that it’s shared and adopts parts of other cultures it encounters. Cultures mash together, they split apart, they change and evolve. Remember the Japanese tea party firestorm?

https://cheshireinthemiddle.tumblr.com/post/131407267302

And to top it off, basically 80 percent of japanese customs, traditions, and food, came from other countries. Japanese is an integration of different cultures, like america. Japan takes influences from places like korea, china, russia, and europe. If japan stuck to itself, there would be no tempura, japanese tea, tea ceremonies, kabuki, japanese bread, japanese curry, j- pop, anime, cars, or modern fishing techniques.

Then:

When you tell people they can only experience things ‘meant for their race’, it totally smacks of segregation to me and I can’t stand it. As someone who (obviously) loves Japan, I say let people learn about it, let people experience it, let people appreciate it. You don’t have to know every single thing about a culture to enjoy it.

That’s what humanity does. It stops living in isolated boxes and thinking it got everything right the first time, and instead interacts and learns from each other.

So the mistake in the sense of "identifying with" culture (and as I said at the outset, I have trouble with the whole "identify as/with" thing), or having an affinity for or interest in a different culture, is a misunderstanding, or perhaps being misled by ideologues, that you must belong to a particular category in order to participate in a particular culture. You don't.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably a racist, viewing it as "that's what those people do, that's what they do." Classic racists view that culture as a bad thing not to be participated in by the "we", while neoracists view it as a virtuous, holy thing, and to be protected from the "we".

All you should do is have sincerity. That's it. Like learning a new language, you're probably going to get it wrong sometimes, but despite the scolding of ideologues, most people who see you putting in the effort to learn about and participate in their culture will be happy to see you making the effort.

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Here's where things get interesting. There's arguably a better case for identifying as a different (perceived) "race" than a different gender.

The average black American has about 20% European ancestry, and about 5% Native American ancestry. "Race" is a spectrum. On the other hand, every human is either male or female.

Surely it's no more unreasonable for an ostensibly "black" person to embrace their 15% white Scottish heritage than to embrace their 15% black Ghanan heritage. Why can't you choose which bits of yourself to "identify" as/with? Why can someone identify as "cupcakegender" (I shit you not 🤡) and demand you use their pronouns, but someone else can't "identify with" her black great-grandmother? One of these is actually real.

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Personally, I don't see the value in being anything other than what you are. I don't "identify" with or as my skin color, it's just what I have. I think the reasons I've been able to find for why people might identify as transracial are inherently flawed, reflecting flawed thinking in the person and flawed thinking in society, particularly around the fetishization of, sacredness of, and hyperfixation on skin color.

It is interesting, however, to watch the logic of the people who dismiss immutable biological reality as a social fiction, asserting that a social fiction is an immutable biological reality. Who insist you can’t gatekeep someone’s identity, and then proceed to gatekeep someone’s identity. Mostly because it would collapse their ideology.

It’s almost..... Xianly. Like when I tell them that the “sin” I inherited from Adam and Eve is canceled out by the salvation I inherited from my religious ancestors, and they tell me that I can’t do that.