Wednesday, June 17, 2015; 12:30:58 PM Eastern
Why it's wrong for a white person to self-declare as black
- In an op-ed piece in today's NY Times Tamara Winfrey Harris explains: "Racial identity cannot be fluid as long as the definition of whiteness is fixed."
- It's rare that a moral argument has such a precise and simple resolution. You can only go one way if it makes sense to go the other.
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who is over 7 feet tall, made a similar analogy in a Time essay. You can allow a white person to self-declare as black, if he can self-declare as 5 foot 8 inches tall.
- We may want to live in a world where a black person could decide to be treated as if they were white, but we do not live in that world.
- In other words, there are some things about us that are immutable.