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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23919 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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First, how sure are we that he is actually black, given that he lied about everything else?

Freddie deBoer refers to this phenomenon (white people passing themselves off as non-white to advance their careers) as Dolezalism, and calls it an entirely expected byproduct of the incentive structures in academia, activist NGOs and so on. (When someone pointed out how his argument applied to – uhh, another thing that people can pass themselves off as, he closed the comments on the article. Never change, Freddie.)

He cited many examples of Dolezals, and the thing I found fascinating was that all of them were women. (And by "women" I mean "female people".) I have literally never heard of a white male academic attempting to pass himself off as black, Hispanic or similar. I vaguely recall Johnny Depp claiming to have partial Native American ancestry, and there's a Wikipedia page called "Indigenous identity fraud in Canada and the United States" in which male examples outnumber female. But a white man passing himself off as black is unheard of, to the best of my knowledge.

But yeah – if this was a story about Jacinta Arday being accused of plagiarism, I'm sure Cofnas would be going full forensic accounting, purloining her bank statements in an effort to determine if she'd purchased a tanning bed or had been to Istanbul to undergo a Brazilian butt lift.

(When someone pointed out how his argument applied to – uhh, another thing that people can pass themselves off as, he closed the comments on the article. Never change, Freddie.)

There is speculation that he is inconsistent on the trans question because of one particularly openly trans (and influential?) relative of his.

I've heard this several times before. His sister also has a Substack and she once posted an utterly sophomoric article about how gender-affirming care is safe and effective, and she'd know because her own son daughter child has been subjected to it. Upon reading said article, an awful lot clicked into place.

What about Shaun King? does he qualify?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_King

Oh damn, I forgot all about him. You don't hear so much about him ever since BLM fell off.

I have literally never heard of a white male academic attempting to pass himself off as black, Hispanic or similar.

Mindy Kaling's brother is apparently one such? Though he wasn't an academic. I do wonder if there are some cases which we haven't yet heard of, the thing is that if you are going to pretend to be black or Hispanic, if you have some heritage there it's a lot easier. It may be that there is less of an advantage for a male academic to add on minority identity than for a female academic (I think Elizabeth Warren still holds the record there for "most advantage derived from a family story of possible indigenous ancestry").

I think it might also have been more common in previous centuries; in the 19th to mid 20th century, hiding any (say) Italian or Hispanic ancestry and presenting as completely 'white' in the racial context of the time would have benefited male academics more than claiming minority status or heritage. Take the Healy family, a mix of Irish and African-American, where the sons staunchly denied and hid their slave ancestry while becoming prominent in American Catholicism, amongst other fields. If you look at the photographs with the Wikipedia articles, they passed as wholly white. The irony today would be that they would have great difficulty claiming their black heritage because they are so passing.

Mindy Kaling's brother is apparently one such?

He may have faked being black, but he certainly wasn't a white male.

True and the whole Kamala Harris thing where Afroindians or other similar borderline groups will try to wildly fluctuate the dial for maximal advantage seems pretty common.

Bruce Pascoe is an Australian male who has claimed indigenous heritage and has received pushback from both far left and right wing sources on it. Partly since his indigenous research is controversial to both sides for threading the needle somewhat in claiming Aboriginal cultures were more advanced than given credit for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Pascoe

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