On #RachelDolezal and the Incomparability of Race and Gender
after reading Adolph Reed Jr.'s eloquently-written recent piece on #RachelDolezal and continuing to see people (including Reed) trip themselves all up in making (in)comparisons between transgender and transrace people, i felt the need to rehash -- in a more cohesive manner -- some comments i recently made to my inner circle on the identity politics of #RachelDolezal. the ascriptive/achieved dichotomization, and the fluidity between the two, is too simplistic to make to gain clarity on the complex problematics of #RachelDolezal's identity politics. race and gender are both sociopolitical constructs. but, unlike gender’s corollary to sex, there is no precise biological language for talking about race. and that is the conceptual incongruence with comparing transgender with transrace identities. the race concept encompasses both biological and sociopolitical meanings in everyday society, whereas the women’s movement has been (mostly) successful at divorcing gender from sex. t...