Essay 5 Due 6-6-18

This is your Capstone Essay. It requires 3 sources for your Works Cited to get credit.

Option A

Read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison and write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the contention that it is morally objectionable for white woman Rachel Dolezal to fabricate an identity to pass as being black. Also consult the parody of Rachel Dolezal in the Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” in which Paper Boi discusses “trans-racial” issues with Montague. You can also consult Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide.

Option B

Take yet another topic we haven’t yet covered from Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act and develop an argumentative thesis.

Option C

Read Jessica McCrory Calarco’s essay “‘Free-Range’ Parenting’s Unfair Double Standard” and support or refute her claim. See Washington Post and Reason’s “The Fragile Generation.”

Option D

Read Brendan Foht’s “The Case Against Human Gene Editing” and write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the claim that gene editing poses moral and political problems that we cannot handle. For a contrary opinion, see "A case against a moratorium on gene editing" in The Conversation. Consult NYT "Why Are Scientists So Upset About the First CRISPR Babies?" See Vox account of "terrifying new chapter" in CRISPR. Also consult Jennifer Kahn Ted Talk video.

Option E

Read David Brooks’ “How We Are Ruining America” and support, refute, or complicate the contention that Brooks has written a misleading, stupid, deceptive, and grossly wrong-minded essay.

Option F

Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and address the claim that Bloom, trying to sell lots of books, is writing a disingenuous argument, relying more on semantics and trickery than substance, to write a sensationalistic, hyped-up thesis.

Option G

Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and write an argumentative essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the authors’ claim that a certain type of coddling is destroying young people’s mental health.

Option H

Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Giving Up on Preventative Care” and support, refute, or complicate her thesis that we should resist the preventive care of America’s medical establishment.

Option I

Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”

Option J

In the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" and Hasan Minhaj's Netflix 72-minute comedy special "Homecoming King," compare and contrast the chimera of social status as a chimera between a white man, Dexter Green, and a self-described member of the "New Brown America," Hasan Minhaj. What special challenges do immigrants of color face as they try to find belonging, acceptance, and social status in America? How do these immigrants struggle to fit in with their American peers and fit their parents' expectations at the same time? How does this conflict add pressure to their quest to find status and belonging in America?

Option K

In the context of Madeleine Pape's Guardian essay "I was sore at losing to Caster Semeyna," develop an argumentative thesis about the controversy surrounding Semeyna's desire to compete in women's sports. You can also consult the NYT editorial "The Myth of Testosterone," "The Controversy Around Caster Semeyna Explained," and "The Caster Semeyna Ruling Is a Disgrace to the Sporting World."

Option L

Develop an argument that supports or refutes Chris Hughes' claim that Facebook should be broken up into smaller parts as presented in his essay, "It's Time to Break Up Facebook." Consult NYT's 5 Takeaways from Hughes' editorial and Alexis Madrigal's "We Don't Want to Know How Powerful Mark Zuckerberg Is" in The Atlantic. Also watch Chris Hughes' video. For counterarguments, consult Nick Clegg's NYT's piece "Breaking Up Facebook Is Not the Answer." Also see NYT editorial "Can Facebook Be Fixed? Should It Be?"

Option M

Read Conor Friedersdorf’s “In Defense of Harvey Weinstein’s Harvard Lawyer” and agree or disagree with the contention that representing someone as monstrous and diabolical as Harvey Weinstein performs a civic good. Also consult David French's "Harvard Launches an Attack on the Culture of Liberty."

Next Homework:

Homework #14: Read “The Case Against Gene Editing” by Brendan Foht and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how gene editing is a liability to society.

If we have time, we will see a Hasan Minhaj essay topic such as his comedy special Homecoming King on Netflix. We will examine the case of Rachel Dolezal. We will read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison. We will watch the Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” that skewers Dolezal for her masquerade. You can consult the documentary on Netflix The Rachel Divide. Is her masquerade cause for serious academic inquiry or a pathetic exhibition of white privilege from a narcissist? Homework #14: Read “The Case Against Gene Editing” by Brendan Foht and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how gene editing is a liability to society. If time, we will read Jessica McCrory Calarco’s essay “‘Free-Range’ Parenting’s Unfair Double Standard” and support or refute her claim.

5-16 We will watch video “Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever” in the context of Brendan Foht’s “The Case Against Gene Editing.” We will also look at Netflix Explained episode “Designer DNA.” If we have time, we will look at David Brooks’ “How We Are Ruining America” and explain why so many people attacked Brooks for writing a misleading, stupid, deceptive, and grossly wrong-minded essay. Homework #15: Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains the author’s position.

5-21 We will study Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and explore the pros and cons of his position. We will look at Bloom’s video “Why Empathy Is Not the Best Way to Care.” Homework #16: Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains why they believe a certain type of coddling is destroying young people’s mental health.

5-23 We will cover “The Coddling of the American Mind” and see the co-author Jonathan Haidt explain his position on Bill Maher’s Real Time. Homework #17: Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Why I’m Giving Up Preventative Care” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how she defends her position.

5-28 Go over Barbara Ehrenreich’s argument in her essay “Why I’m Giving Up Preventative Care.” Homework #18: Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook.” You can also consult the video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”

5-30 If we have time, we will cover a Hasan Minhaj essay topic. We will cover Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”

6-4: Peer Edit

6-6 Essay #5 due on turnitin; Portfolio 2 Grade Check in class

Homework #14:

Read “The Case Against Gene Editing” by Brendan Foht and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how gene editing is a liability to society.

Rachel Dolezal charged with welfare fraud.

Question to Frame Your Thesis

Is Rachel Dolezal, by assuming the identity as a black woman, celebrating black culture, or is she a culture vulture committing the sin of cultural appropriation for her own "attention-seeking narcissism"?

Argument That Dolezal Is an Attention-Seeking Narcissist

"I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison

I don’t like Rachel Dolezal. I don’t believe she’s misunderstood or mentally unbalanced or confused. I think she’s a shameless attention-seeker, a vile narcissist, and a grifter. She’s a thief. And the thing she covets the most and is desperately trying to misappropriate is Blackness, specifically the Blackness unique to the descendants of American slaves.

To be the descendant of an American slave is to live in a particular kind of purgatory. It is to be the abused and neglected child who always eats last. It is to stand outside in the wet cold and be denied entry to the vast mansion your ancestors built. It is to be harassed and brutalized by police forces born out of slave patrols. There are daily humiliations, constant reminders that you are of the lower caste. It is to know that your existence is seen as a threat, a threat that may be met with deadly violence at any moment.

The freedom struggle of the descendants of American slaves has a proud tradition that has produced true American heroes. That platform of resistance is an honored space, one that Rachel Dolezal infiltrated with her appalling blackface routine. She was the president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP when she was outed by a local reporter who asked the simple question: “Are you African American?” Stunned that she had been found out, the only reply she could muster was, “I don’t understand the question.”

Soon after that embarrassing interview, it was revealed that Dolezal was White and had been pretending to be a light-complexioned Black woman for years. As evidence, she had shared a photo of her with an African American man she barely knew as one of her and her father. What sort of pathology drives a person to do a thing like that? The same thing that drove her to make claims of racial harassment and report hate crimes, none of which could be substantiated. There’s also the disgusting way she’s taken on the label of “transracial” — co-opting the struggle of perhaps the most marginalized group and turning it into a punchline. Write it down: the next outrage will be her faking a serious illness for sympathy. This is when everyone else will finally turn on her and begin to call out her lies. When she was disrespecting Black people to get attention, it was all good.

There have been plenty of White Americans who have worked towards the cause of racial equality. There was no need for them to fake being Black, and there was no need for Dolezal to do so either. But none of Dolezal’s deception was rooted in her trying to be a genuine ally to Black Americans. This whole production is all about Rachel Dolezal getting to play alternately the victim and the hero. She wants attention, and withholding it is the only thing that might finally get her to stop. And she needs to be stopped.

There is a kind of morbid curiosity that might have made me tune into The Rachel Divide (I mean, the whole thing is such a colossal train wreck). Ironically, it was the teaser Netflix released that cemented my decision to stay away. In the short excerpt, Dolezal’s half-Black son is trying and failing to get his mother to see that her actions have consequences for other people, him in particular. You can hear the exhaustion in his voice, the wearying frustration of trying to teach empathy to a narcissist — an impossibility. All of Dolezal’s replies are about her and her needs. She doesn’t see her son at all. He is merely a prop in her psychodrama.

What Dolezal is doing to her son is a form of child abuse.

And that’s why I’m not watching. I’m not enabling that and adding to his suffering. Each view humiliates that child, and he deserves so much better. (I was going to link out to the teaser, but watching it made me feel so gross. I think giving even that short snippet views isn’t a moral choice.)

While Dolezal needs to disappear, we can’t forget her. The descendants of American slaves need to understand that she is the first of many to come. As cries for slavery and Jim Crow reparations grow stronger, you’ll see more White Americans start doing genetic tests and looking into their genealogy to find a link, so they can shove themselves to the front of the line if the payout comes.

Erasure is one of the most powerful tools of racism. And it’s what White America is going to double down on next.

Rachel Dolezal is the canary in the coal mine. Trying to steal the lineage and very identity of the descendants of slaves will be the next mutation of American racism. We all must be prepared to confront it and beat it back.

NYT Editorial Critique of Dolezal

Possible Dolezal Defenses to Consider in Your Argument Or Counterargument

One. Just as we accept men who feel they identify with women and go through gender-transition process, we should accept Dolezal for going through a similar racial transition. Is the comparison legit?

Two. Since race is not a real thing and is nothing more than a social construct, why should we care if Dolezal identifies and passes as "black"?

Three. Dolezal's need to identify and "be" black doesn't hurt anyone. Why are we treating her with so much disdain as if she were a criminal? Does that not say more about us than it does her?

Four. Dolezel is championing civil rights for African Americans. She is a bona fide "sister in the struggle." She has earned the right to "be black." How dare we question her noble motives.

Jelani Cobb's Thesis Paragraph: "We're all wearing the fictive garb of race."

The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie.

"Lying about the lie": Race is not a simple category set in stone; rather, race is an arbitrary social construction historically designed to service a power hierarchy.

We read, for example, in Debra Dickerson's essay "The Great White Way," that white America initially tagged southern Europeans, Slavs, Greeks, and Italians, for example, as "black" and then around 1920 Anglo White America "allowed" these southern Europeans to earn their "whiteness" by assimilating into Anglo culture. However, they did not give such license to African-Americans and Latinos.

According to Jelani Cobb's logic, since race is a fiction and a lie, we should not be so offended by the lie that Rachel Dolezal assumes as she parades through life under the guise of a black identity.

Refuting Cobb's argument:

Try telling African Americans that their race is a lie when racial perception results in higher rates of police brutality, mass incarceration, and an income gap of 10:1 in favor of white Americans.

In spite of African Americans' struggle and oppression in America, African Americans wield huge influence over the world in terms of language and culture. The whole world is influenced by African American culture: language, style, music, art, fashion, entertainment, and business.

The whole world imitates and borrows from African-American culture, which has the biggest influence than any culture in the world.

Cultural influence is one thing. Piggy-backing on another culture is another thing.

But cultural appropriation, some argue, takes cultural borrowing too far to the point that one is stealing.

Pretending your black, putting on fake tan and using tanning booth, and telling the world you're black, many would argue, is taking cultural influence too far.

Rachel Dolezal wants positive attention as being a "sister in the struggle." Many people are annoyed by this.

Rachel Dolezal and her defenders say we should not be annoyed. It's cool to for Rachel, a white woman, to masquerade as a sister in the struggle.

At what point does a non African-American commit an act of cultural appropriation?

Should we be morally offended by white people passing as African American?

If you had a white college instructor championing black rights and disguising himself as black, would you be able to take that instructor seriously? Would you have any moral objections to such a professor? Would you question that professor's mental stability? Or would you "be cool with it"?

Sample Thesis Statements

Even if Rachel Dolezal is an attention-seeking narcissist using race to expand her status and social cachet, her claim to belong to the African-American is not a crime or an offense because there is no such thing as race except as a fiction that we all pretend to exist. By condemning Rachel Dolezal for masquerading as an African-American, we are guilty of perpetuating the mythology that race is an objective reality.

Refutation of the Above

While we can all agree that race is a mythology, the fact remains that America has used skin color as an arbitrary way to manage power and that people of color have been stolen from by America's kleptocracy. For Rachel Dolezal to appropriate blackness to elevate her social esteem while enjoying her white privilege is morally disgusting and morally bankrupt, evidence of a selfish narcissist, evidence of someone willing to mock and steal from the very people she claims to represent, and evidence of a kind of fraud that has no place in championing civil rights, especially someone who works for the NAACP.

Wild Card Thesis

Rachel Dolezal is a "special case" so embedded in pathological behavior that to use her charade as an argument about race misses the point. She is not so much appropriating race as much as she is evidencing a serious mental illness that requires medical attention.

Rachel Dolezal Update in NYT

"Black Like Her" by Jelani Cobb in The New Yorker

On June 7th, Elinor Burkett published an Op-Ed in the Times expressing what she portrayed as a feminist’s reluctant skepticism about aspects of the transgender movement. She argued, in part, that the notion of men simply transitioning into women was equivalent to a white person darkening his or her skin and professing to be black. The example was meant as a reductio ad absurdum—but, less than a week later, Rachel Dolezal, the president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a professor of Africana studies, was unveiled as a white woman who has for some years presented herself and identified as black. On Monday, Dolezal resigned, in a statement that didn’t answer questions about what she referred to as "my personal identity,” though it did refer obliquely to “challenging the construct of race.” That answer is clearly inadequate; many people have challenged the construct of race without lying about their lives. But there is something more worth discussing here.

Among African-Americans, there is a particular contempt, rooted in the understanding that black culture was formed in a crucible of degradation, for what Norman Mailer hailed as the “white Negro.” Whatever elements of beauty or cool, whatever truth or marketable lies there are that we associate with blackness, they are ultimately the product of a community’s quest to be recognized as human in a society that is only ambivalently willing to see it as such. And it is this root that cannot be assimilated. The white Negroes, whose genealogy stretches backward from Azalea through Elvis and Paul Whiteman, share the luxury of being able to slough off blackness the moment it becomes disadvantageous, cumbersome, or dangerous. It is an identity as impermanent as burnt cork, whose profitability rests upon an unspoken suggestion that the surest evidence of white superiority is the capacity to exceed blacks even at being black. The black suspicion of whites thus steeped in black culture wasn’t bigotry; it was a cultural tariff—an abiding sense that, if they knew all that came with the category, they would be far less eager to enlist.

But this is precisely what makes the Dolezal deception complicated. Artists like Eminem and Teena Marie, white people who were by and large accepted by black people as a legitimate part of black cultural life, nonetheless had to finesse a kind of epidermal conflict of interest. Irrespective of their sincerity, a portion of their profitability lay in their status as atypically white. Dolezal’s transracialism was imbued with exactly the opposite undertaking. She passed as black and set about shouldering the inglorious, frustrating parts of that identity—the parts that allocate responsibility for what was once called “uplifting the race.” It’s an aspect of her story that at least ought to give her critics—black ones, particularly—a moment of pause.

Dolezal is, like me, a graduate of Howard University, a place where the constellation of black identities and appearances is so staggeringly vast as to ridicule the idea that blackness could be, or ever has been, any one thing. What I took from Howard, besides that broadened sense of a world I’d presumed to know, was an abiding debt to those who’d fought on its behalf and a responsibility to do so for those who came afterward. It’s easy to deride Dolezal’s dishonesty—to ridicule her hoax as a clever means of sidestepping the suspicion with which white liberals are commonly greeted—until we reflect on a photograph of Walter White, the aptly named man who served as the second black president of the N.A.A.C.P. Or one of Louis T. Wright, who served as the national chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. board during the Great Depression. In the nineteen-twenties, amid a feud with the organization, the black nationalist Marcus Garvey criticized the N.A.A.C.P. for being a organization whose black and white members were essentially indistinguishable.

The spectrum of shades and colorings that constitute “black” identity in the United States, and the equal claim to black identity that someone who looks like White or Wright (or, for that matter, Dolezal) can have, is a direct product of bloodlines that attest to institutionalized rape during and after slavery. Nearly all of us who identify as African-American in this country, apart from some more recent immigrants, have at least some white ancestry. My own white great-grandparent is as inconsequential as the color of my palms in terms of my status as a black person in the United States. My grandparents had four children: my father and his brother, both almond-brown, with black hair and dark eyes, and two girls with reddish hair, fair skin, freckles, and gray eyes. All of them were equally black because they were equal heirs to the quirks of chance determining whether their ancestry from Europe or Africa was most apparent. Dolezal’s primary offense lies not in the silly proffering of a false biography but in knowing this ugly history and taking advantage of the reasons that she would, at least among black people, be taken at her word regarding her identity.

Race, in this country and under certain circumstances, functions like a faith, in that the simple profession of membership is sufficient. The most—possibly the sole—democratic element of race in this country lies in this ecumenical approach to blackness. We are not in the business of checking membership cards. In this way, Dolezal’s claim on black identity is of a different order than the hollow declaration of a Hollywood scion or anyone else who opted to be Negro for a season. They can plead ignorance. But Dolezal spent four years at an institution steeped in the delicacies of race. If nothing else, she understands the exact nature of the trust she violated.

Despite the interchangeability of the terms “African-American” and “black,” this is a community in which ancestry is one, but clearly not the sole or necessarily even the primary, basis for inclusion. Walter White was only fractionally more African than Dolezal, but black enough to be accepted as not only a member of that community but one of its leaders. There is also a disquieting notion inherent in this approach to identity—that if anyone can indeed be “black,” then we all are, that Morrison and Coltrane and Chisholm and Malcolm are both unhyphenated Americans and indistinct. (And yet, in circumstances where someone named Eric Garner or Walter Scott is looking nervously over his shoulder, they are still vulnerably intelligible.) It putatively means that Chet Haze is as qualified to utter the word "nigga" as anyone for whom dark skin and skewed life chances have given the word connotations Haze would never countenance. It means, most damningly, that black people are not distinctly bound to each other. Yet both of these things—a community rooted in race and a deep-seated skepticism about the very existence of race—coexist.

Rachel Dolezal is not black—by lineage or lifelong experience—yet I find her deceptions less troubling than the vexed criteria being used to exclude her. If blackness is simply a matter of a preponderance of African ancestry, then we should set about the task of excising a great deal of the canon of black history, up to and including the current President. If it is simply a matter of shared experience, we might excommunicate people like Walter White, whose blue eyes were camouflage that could serve both to spare him the direct indignity of racism and enable him to personally investigate and expose lynchings. Dolezal was dishonest about an undertaking rooted in dishonesty, and no matter how absurd her fictional blackness may appear, it is worth recalling that the former lie is far more dangerous than the latter. Our means of defining ourselves are complex and contradictory—and could be nothing other than that. But if the rubric is faulty it remains vital. The great majority of Americans recognize slavery as a figment of history, interred in a receding past. But, for black people, that past remains at the surface—close at hand, indelible, a narrative as legible as skin.