Another "Black Activist" Outed As White

Mumbles said:
I'm not concerned with your off-topic beefs.

In any case, the total number of "black activists" outed as white remains at one - and that one gained far more fame for being white than for being a black activist. This, despite multiple attempt to find such a case by the sites I have mentioned ) Wesley Lowery, who is actually a journalist and not an activist, went through similar crap - as well as President Obama's fictixious Arab parentage). The overall issue, yet again, is that conservative sites such as the above see "racism" as a term of attack, rather than a matter of actual concern. This flailing ultimately the same as the unaware claims that "blacks are the real racists" - an " I'm rubber you're glue" response that tries and fails to deflect the charge.
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I have no beef with any media site. I just think it's ironic that people decry something that has occurred since the first ruler hired a town herald. Every corporation, company and person has a bias and that's not going to change. Pointing out a particular sites bias is the equivalent of exclaiming "water is wet!" in a serious conversation and expecting to be praised for your intelligence and insight. :)

As far as the main point of the thread, this guy's racial heritage is of absolutely no interest to me. I'm with King on this one, the content of your character matters, not the color of your skin. I just find it fascinating in a general sense that in this day and age, it's more politically and financially advantageous to be a member of the "oppressed" class than the supposed "oppressor" class, especially when applying to most colleges but also in other areas of life.
 
cmikes said:
I have no beef with any media site. I just think it's ironic that people decry something that has occurred since the first ruler hired a town herald. Every corporation, company and person has a bias and that's not going to change. Pointing out a particular sites bias is the equivalent of exclaiming "water is wet!" in a serious conversation and expecting to be praised for your intelligence and insight. :)
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Who said anything about "amazing insight"? There are plenty of people who pointed out exactly what I've said immediately - SG, Salon.com, Joy Reid, Shaun King himself, and the list goes on and on. And I'm not even mad at the breitbart folks - their readers want to be suckered, so breitbart is happy to rip them off. My contempt is held for people who pretend that they're some sort of neutral source, even though they clearly biased and dishonest.

As far as the main point of the thread, this guy's racial heritage is of absolutely no interest to me. I'm with King on this one, the content of your character matters, not the color of your skin. I just find it fascinating in a general sense that in this day and age, it's more politically and financially advantageous to be a member of the "oppressed" class than the supposed "oppressor" class, especially when applying to most colleges but also in other areas of life.
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Well, studies and government data have repeatedly shown the opposite, so...yeah. Rachel Dolezal isn't famous for being black or for being some sort of "activist", as the big example here - she's famous for being a white woman who pretended to be black. Shaun King, in the grand scheme of things, was also not a very famous person, until Breitbart decided to push the claim that he was the same. And what fame he did have was for being an activist, not for being black, which is something he simply didn't talk about.
 
Doghouse Reilly said:
Hold on here, I don't think it's accurate to say that being "black" in America is just something you are because you "identity" with it or experience it socially. The purpose of black scholarships and so forth is to provide aid to those who LITERALLY descended from people who were slaves.
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You're LITERALLY wrong:

Morehouse declined to comment on the allegations on Wednesday, but officials said in a message on Twitter that the college did not grant admissions or scholarships based on race.
 
bit_pattern said:
You're LITERALLY wrong:

Morehouse declined to comment on the allegations on Wednesday, but officials said in a message on Twitter that the college did not grant admissions or scholarships based on race.
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I think it's a little more complicated.

As far as I understand it (not far), the scholarship was not a Morehouse scholarship, but one coming from Oprah's foundation or some such. So the fact that Morehouse doesn't grant scholarships based on race doesn't mean the scholarship in question doesn't have a racial consideration.
 
Mumbles said:
There are plenty of people who identify as "black" who could "pass" as white. There have also been "black" people in history who did "pass" for white, to the point of abandoning their "black" families for fear that their "white" colleagues would reject, and quite possibly kill, them if discovered. And like many conventions and stereotypes, these both have long histories in the US. So this isn't at all new.
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Yes, I worked with and became friends with a woman who looked white, but had a black mother and a white father. Her son looks black (his father is). She is very into her black heritage, talks about it with her friends, had Ebony magazines in her house ;) and was generally proud of it.

On the flip side, she dyed her hair blonde, had a nose job that made her look more white, mainly because of her career.

Looking white doesn't necessarily mean that one did not grow up around prejudice or that they were never discriminated against. I think that would depend on a number of factors.

Most of the time though, black people are discriminated against because they look black.

The question was though, do black people think that someone who looks as white as King should be given the same considerations since he most likely has not suffered the day to day discrimination as someone who is actually black? Is he really in need or deserving of a scholarship to a black school because he is supposedly African American?

I'm just curious about this. Looking black seems to be the main reason one is discriminated against, not simply having the ancestry.

ETA:
I guess the next question might be, how would one determine whether or not someone was black enough to be black? :cool:
 
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phiwum said:
I think it's a little more complicated.

As far as I understand it (not far), the scholarship was not a Morehouse scholarship, but one coming from Oprah's foundation or some such. So the fact that Morehouse doesn't grant scholarships based on race doesn't mean the scholarship in question doesn't have a racial consideration.
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No. Oprah's foundation does not grant scholarships. It funds the scholarship programs run by a number of different institutions, including Morehouse.
 
Prometheus said:
No. Oprah's foundation does not grant scholarships. It funds the scholarship programs run by a number of different institutions, including Morehouse.
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Okay, thanks for the correction. I must have misunderstood or gotten some bad information.
 
mgidm86 said:
The question was though, do black people think that someone who looks as white as King should be given the same considerations since he most likely has not suffered the day to day discrimination as someone who is actually black? Is he really in need or deserving of a scholarship to a black school because he is supposedly African American?
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Well, I'm pretty sure that there are self-claimed white people who get scholarships to HBCUs, so he really wouldn't need to falsify his family to begin with.

This isn't one of those issues that you can get right in a single post - since it deals with some rather confusing lines of discrimination (eg. black immigrants versus black southern Americans, colorism within black communities, and so forth), quite a bit of history on HBCUs in particular, and so on. Suffice it to say that you'll never get a clear "what black people think" on this.
 
cmikes said:
Along with Media Matters, Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times, and a number of other "news" organizations, so what's the point? It's only bad when a right wing site does it, but it's fine and dandy when a left wing site does exactly the same thing?:confused:
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BS of a high order. The level of dishonesty that Breitbart routinely engages in is highly unusual. The organizations you list do nothing of the sort. To foist Breitbart, on a skeptics forum no less, is beyond asinine.
 
cmikes said:
I have no beef with any media site. I just think it's ironic that people decry something that has occurred since the first ruler hired a town herald. Every corporation, company and person has a bias and that's not going to change. Pointing out a particular sites bias is the equivalent of exclaiming "water is wet!" in a serious conversation and expecting to be praised for your intelligence and insight. :)
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This is actually an important skeptical principle, though: when we evaluate claims we need to determine if the claimant has a tendency to allow bias to influence how they convey information. We use probability of truth in a Beyesian approach.

We all have biases and conflicts of interest, but some of people and organizations are less influenced by them than others. This builds a reputation for source reliability, which is in my opinion the most important critical thinking skill since 99.99999% of the time we are not experts in the topic at hand and do not perform primary research.
 
mgidm86 said:
Being black is not a social construct, people are treated negatively because they look black, not because they identify as being black.
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And "light skinned blacks" (mixed race people) like Obama, Colin Powell, Don Lemon, Halle Berry, Beyonce, and etc get treated better than blacks without any superficially apparent admixture (wesley snipes, don cheadle, etc).

Skeptic Tank said:
According to the metrics of both Ancestry.com and 23andme.com I am 100% European.
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Those metrics are pretty crappy and certainly not any where close to what the best science has to offer.
 
cmikes said:
Along with Media Matters, Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times, and a number of other "news" organizations, so what's the point? It's only bad when a right wing site does it, but it's fine and dandy when a left wing site does exactly the same thing?:confused:
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It's not right or left, it's blatantly wrong/purposefully wrong vs a modest or better attempt at reporting factually. The guy most likely does have a black father. Yet Blaze and Breitbart were drooling over the chance to blow the racism dog whistle for their audiences.
 
Strange Brew
Goldberg had several online personas: an Islamic radical who was popular in ISIS social media; a white supremacist on hate site Daily Stormer; a feminist on Daily Kos; a radical free-speech advocate on Q&A site Ask.fm, and a sympathizer with GamerGate. Goldberg is also accused of being behind a Times of Israel blog post that called Palestinians “subhuman.”
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