Political Correctness Eats Itself

Sometimes, everybody sees the moment when everything changes.  Pearl Harbor, Kennedy's assassination, the fall of the Berlin Wall - everyone knew in a matter of hours that they were living in a different world.

Other changes take a bit longer as more and more people come to realize the necessity and profundity of the change: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights protests took a while to build, but by the time of his assassination it was obvious that America wasn't ever going back accepting Jim Crow as the natural order of things.

And then, there are events that create a big flap which everyone sees, except that they also represent far-reaching changes that take a long time to make themselves known, and maybe can only be seen in retrospect.  The last few days contained a combination of furors that, combined, will ultimately change our politics, culture, and worldview.

It's All in Your Head?

NAACP Spokane, WA Chapter President Rachel Dolezal had an awful week that only someone who's being blackmailed can even imagine.  A career- and life-destroying fact about her past came into full public view, leading her to be pilloried by all and sundry as well as to the loss of her job, reputation, and position in society.

Her crime?  She is white.

Well, that's not really the complete story.  Ms. Dolezal is, in fact, white; the problem is that she claimed to be black to help her rise through the ranks of the NAACP.  ABC News provided an interesting photo-essay documenting "her transition from a pale young girl with blond hair to a darker-skinned leader in the country’s oldest civil rights organization."

Mercifully, the lying Ms. Dolezal eventually resigned from all positions of public prominence.  Earlier in the week, though, she gamely made an attempt to justify her fraud which even her customary liberal media allies couldn't stomach.  She told the Today Show's Matt Lauer:

"I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon, and black curly hair"... But she insisted she never deceived anyone as numerous critics have suggested.

"I do take exception to that because it's a little more complex than me identifying as black or answering a question of, are you black or white?" she said.

With this preposterous statement, and certainly without meaning to, Ms. Dolezal has revealed the utter fraud of our modern politicized system of race-baiting and political correctness.

Objectively speaking, her statement is arrant nonsense.  So what if she drew pictures of "herself" as black?  Nobody made Salvador Dali put his self-portrait on his Spanish identity card.

In point of fact, telling whether you're white or black is ridiculously simple for most people: look at your parents or grandparents.  If they're all of one thing, that's what you are, like it or not.

There are people today who have ancestors of multiple races, and in that case there's room for opinion.  Not so for Ms. Dolezal, whose parents are lily-white enough for President Obama to condemn them as typically racist if he ever met them, just as he condemned his own white grandmother.

But Not In Your Pants?

In other news, one of what everyone assumed to be the manliest of men, Olympic gold medalist and world record holder, the once world's greatest athlete Bruce Jenner suddenly presented himself as a stunningly hot babe, "Caitlyn" Jenner, thanks to spending more money than most of us will ever see on the miracles of modern plastic surgery.

Let's be honest: the surgery that Drs. Alter and Harrison performed on Mr(s) Jenner is remarkable in all sorts of ways.  Any normal man, not knowing who (s)he really is, might have a biological reaction on encountering Mr(s) Jenner in photo or in the flesh.  Not too many 65-year-old natural-born women look half as good as this 65-year-old man!

That raises, as it were, a problem: what happens when Jenner sees him/herself in the mirror?  (The English language wasn't built for this sort of nonsense!)

Yes, that's right: despite outward appearances, and though we certainly have no desire to actually do this, a close inspection of Jenner would most assuredly "find Captain Winkie!"  For all his claims of "feeling like" a woman, and for all that he looks like one to the casual observer, Jenner has yet to call for the services of a blind rabbi to really go all the way.

Despite his being genetically, historically, biologically, and even physically a man, we are all expected to accept that he's a chick merely on his own say-so.  In fact, merely pointing out (heh) Mr(s) Jenner's objective biological reality is claimed by the high priests of political correctness to be racist sexist bigotry of the worst sort.

When a person claims to be Napoleon or Teddy Roosevelt, we call for men in white coats.  If a person goes to a surgeon and asks him to remove his perfectly healthy arm because he "feels like" a handicapped person, he'll wind up in the loony bin, not in the OR.

But when a man pays for extensive body modification and calls himself a girl, we're supposed to throw confetti as he walks into the ladies' locker room?  Not if my daughter's in there!  The last thing we need is to encourage young men to - well, as Mike Huckabee bravely pointed out:

“Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE,” said Huckabee. “I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’ You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

Actually, no; it would be funny but only if it were in a comedy movie.  In the real world, it's scary, disgusting, and dangerous - and we need to respond to the poor deluded souls suffering under this particular form of mental illness with sympathy, pity, and a motivation to get them the professional help they so desperately need.

The Inmates Are Running The Asylum

So we return to Ms. Dolezal, for whom at least we know what honorific to use, and her erstwhile organization, the NAACP.  In case you've not seen this written in a long time, that august organization's acronym stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

It makes perfect sense that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People should mostly consist of, um, Colored People.  (Maybe they should get with the times and change the name to the National Association for the Advancement of African Americans?  Naaaa.)

Why shouldn't a white person want to see the advancement of people whose ancestors were enslaved by ours?  Isn't that the honorable thing to do?  Isn't this in fact what we're constantly told affirmative action is all about?  What is affirmative action, but the advancement of colored people over white people by (presumably) right-thinking white people?

Thus, logically, the NAACP should not merely allow whites into the leadership, they should encourage them.  Don't we all need allies to promote our views?

Yet Ms. Dolezal felt that her chosen career as an advocate for blacks would be enhanced by falsely claiming blackness.  Doesn't this say something odious about the NAACP culture and the culture of the American political elite in general?

What's more, for many years now the Left has trumpeted the claim that race is merely a social construct, that there is no genetic difference between the races.  From the perspective of skin melanin content, this is obvious nonsense, but Ms. Dolezal seemed to take it seriously.

If race is just a figment of our imaginations, though, then there should be no NAACP.  If black people think that whites have it better, they merely need to declare themselves to be white and nobody can say them nay.

One could theorize that Bruce Jenner has some of the same motivations for self-advancement as Ms. Dolezal.  Considering his relation by marriage with the Kardashian freak show, it's easy to imagine how an already psychologically troubled person might wish to be fawned over like the well-known celebrity relatives he sees every day, both in the flesh as well as every other media known to (wo)man.

For sure, it's worked: he was rich and famous before, but now he's a household name with a reality TV show all his own.  He'd appeared on TV with the Kardasians; he now basks in his own glory rather than making do with their reflected glory.  Likewise with pulchritude: he's if anything better endowed now than his ex-wife by whom he'd had six children.

The small-minded among us might ask, given that he was born with X-Y chromosomes and has not had the surgeons literally unman him, just how much of a woman is he really, but we're told that that would be unkind.  Except, of course, for an outraged feminist who said exactly that.

Back in the Bill Clinton era, many American wrung their hands over how they could possibly explain to their children what they were seeing on the news about blue dresses, misuse of cigars, and Monica Lewinsky in general.  It's a sad indictment of how far we've fallen that for the national conversation to return to the subject of fellatio would be an improvement.

The only silver lining is, political correctness has now become so transparently fatuous that surely, surely, normal people will follow the lead of Mike Huckabee and start treating it with the contempt and derision it so richly deserves.