{"id":41628,"date":"2015-07-02T01:33:09","date_gmt":"2015-07-02T01:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41628"},"modified":"2015-07-02T01:33:09","modified_gmt":"2015-07-02T01:33:09","slug":"dolezal-controversy-sharpens-focus-on-racial-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41628","title":{"rendered":"Dolezal Controversy Sharpens Focus on Racial Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.umass.edu\/umpress\/news\/dolezal-controversy-sharpens-focus-racial-identity\" target=\"_blank\">Dolezal Controversy Sharpens Focus on Racial Identity<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.umass.edu\/umpress\" target=\"_blank\">University of Massachusetts Press<\/a><br \/>\n2015-06-26<\/p>\n<p>The recent controversy concerning <a href=\"http:\/\/spokanenaacp.com\/rachel-dolezal\/\" target=\"_blank\">Rachel Dolezal\u2019s<\/a> racial identity steered many readers to a 2008 UMass Press book by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jjay.cuny.edu\/faculty\/baz-dreisinger\" target=\"_blank\">Baz Dreisinger<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=6478\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture<\/em><\/a>, which explores cases in which legally white individuals are imagined, by themselves or by others, as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5864\" target=\"_blank\">passing for black<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Many <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jjay.cuny.edu\/news\/professor-baz-dreisinger-discusses-history-racial-appropriation-new-york-times-cnn-atlantic-and\" target=\"_blank\">news venues<\/a>\u2014the <em>New York Times, CNN, LA Times, The Atlantic<\/em>, and others\u2014found their way to Dreisinger to ask her thoughts. The controversy, Dreisinger told the <em>New York Times<\/em>, \u201ctaps into all of these issues around blackface and wearing blackness and that whole cultural legacy, which makes it that much more vile.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/politics\/archive\/2015\/06\/rachel-dolezal-and-the-history-of-passing-for-black\/395882\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>, Dreisinger said \u201cI think it\u2019s critical to recognize the ways in which American whites have a long legacy of fetishizing blackness, whether they\u2019re literally passing or not, but the ways in which their notions of blackness are based upon caricatures, and not characters. They\u2019re based on idealized or cartoonish notions of what blackness is.\u201d&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.umass.edu\/umpress\/news\/dolezal-controversy-sharpens-focus-racial-identity\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dolezal Controversy Sharpens Focus on Racial Identity University of Massachusetts Press 2015-06-26 The recent controversy concerning Rachel Dolezal\u2019s racial identity steered many readers to a 2008 UMass Press book by Baz Dreisinger, Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture, which explores cases in which legally white individuals are imagined, by themselves or by others, as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,459,8,6462],"tags":[2710,20241,819],"class_list":["post-41628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","tag-baz-dreisinger","tag-rachel-dolezal","tag-university-of-massachusetts-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}