Tuesday, July 07, 2015

Cherokee Or Not

There's a prominent scholar of Native-American studies, Andrea Smith, who apparently isn't a Native-American herself, but somehow passes as one. It has apparently been a long-simmering controversy, and now it has come to a boil.

"Joanne Barker, an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe and professor of American Indian studies at San Francisco State University, wrote a blog post comparing the Dolezal and Smith cases and the relative lack of attention (in the mainstream media) to the latter case."

It's a sort of comedy, to me. If you click the link, you can see what she looks like. She looks about as white as I do, which is pretty white. Academics of the left get a queasy feeling when facing this sort of case, the sort of case in which they vaguely fear they have been revealed as chumps.

On the one hand, self-identification.
On the other hand, cultural appropriation.

Should everyone be free,
to be a minority?

2 comments:

Charlie McDanger said...

There's (still, I think) an oppressed Latino at Berkeley Law making a good and prestigious living dissecting racial injustice. He grew up in Hawaii, appears somewhat Mediterranean, and helpfully changed his surname from Haney to Haney-Lopez to clarify things.

Another we were surprised to learn mid-course was a black man. As white-looking as you or I. Of course Stanford was keen to lure him away!

John Enright said...

This sort of thing has been going on a long time. It's a kind of corruption, but corruption has always been with us!