excerpt from his New Yorker piece (which is an excellent read):

"Rachel Dolezal is not black—by lineage or lifelong experience—yet I find her deceptions less troubling than the vexed criteria being used to exclude her. If blackness is simply a matter of a preponderance of African ancestry, then we should set about the task of excising a great deal of the canon of black history, up to and including the current President. If it is simply a matter of shared experience, we might excommunicate people like Walter White, whose blue eyes were camouflage that could serve both to spare him the direct indignity of racism and enable him to personally investigate and expose lynchings. Dolezal was dishonest about an undertaking rooted in dishonesty, and no matter how absurd her fictional blackness may appear, it is worth recalling that the former lie is far more dangerous than the latter. Our means of defining ourselves are complex and contradictory—and could be nothing other than that."

To be clear on my position, I am *not* using the transrace discourse to try and "back transgender theory into a corner." While I definitely notice conservatives and others who find transgender to be illegitimate doing this, that's not what many others (Cobb, MHP, Chris Hayes etc..) are doing. There is a place in our discourse to discuss this without having to leverage the discussion to discredit other transient identity theories. The parallel to transgender (which many progressives have used to illustrate the social construction and malleable identity politics aspect of the discourse) is for the purpose of identifying the journey that it took before mainstream discourse even accepted "transgender" as a thing. We created "transgender" - just like we created race, and we should never approach these subjects as if they are fixed in concrete universalism.

Rachel Dolezal is actually a poor example of a theoretical discussion on 'transrace' - but her situation nonetheless brought entry into the discussion (that many oddly don't even want to have). But it's less about her than it is more about having a deeper, more critical conversation about race and how we've come to use race in the sphere of identity politics.


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