In the Dark Night

I am still constructing a more research oriented Substack page, which should be up soon, providing that I get ahead of my doctoral studies. Anyway, I just wanted to jot down some quick thoughts I had. Perhaps I will keep this blog as a running commentary on my momentary thoughts, like a hypothesis generator. So, several years back, a woman named Rachel Dolezal, who is 100% Caucasian, presented herself as a black woman and fooled the black activist community. She then said that she identified as black, ergo, she was black [at heart]. I have written in the past about cultural appropriation, whereby cultures grow through adoption of another culture's traits and that sometimes such adoption is complimentary and not really an appropriation. Yet, in Dolezal's case, she was indeed appropriating culture. She had no real experience of what it was like to grow up black as a way to inform her worldview. She merely adopted the culture and pretended. She overplayed sympathy for empathy. Wer...