Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

During a bout of insomnia the other night, I thought of a person I’d long since forgotten about by watching a Netflix documentary; Rachel Dolezal. When news broke of this person a few years ago, I agreed wholeheartedly with the scores of people who accused her of blatant and unapologetic cultural appropriation. White privilege at its highest level, and unforgivable because of the absolute refusal to recognize it. I was never a psycho about it like many (come on society, lets stop wishing death on every single person who offends us, shall we?) but after consuming as much info on the topic of Dolezal as I could, I settled on disliking her and then forgetting her. The documentary, I will admit, turned me around significantly. There was one thing that was mentioned that rang true to me. Someone mentioned a disassociative personality, and a ding ding went off in my mind. It seemed like, though she drastically hurt her cause with her dishonesty, that her advocacy and love of black culture came from a genuine place. Disassociative personalities tend to separate themselves from the thing that harms them by creating an identity that is as distant from that thing as possible. I am a disassociative person. I don’t think it would ever occur to me to make myself into someone it wasn’t even possible for me to be, but I can see how some might. It gave me enough compassion in her to give her book a try. Boy was that a mistake. She maybe should’ve let that documentary do the talking and skipped the manifesto of the eternal victim who is just so gosh darn special in every single way and doggone it why the heck doesn’t anybody like her? I stopped at 48%. I have definitely never 1 starred a book that I didn’t even finish. That’s against my reader code. But this drivel is intolerable. First of all, the writing itself is not good. I realize it is a memoir, but that doesn’t mean that you should eliminate any and all finesse from the writing style. This thing might as well have been a two hundred page list of bullet points of “Why Rachel is Awesome.” Speaking of the never ending self congratulations, seriously, cut it out. It comes off as everything out of her mouth is a lie, and I’m back to square one with attempting to give this woman the benefit of the doubt. The contradictions in this book, and this woman’s thinking presents a portrait of a deeply lost individual. I’m the absolute last person to stand up for religious coo coo birds, but by her own telling, Rachel Dolezal’s account of her parents doesn’t ring true. I’m sure that they’re not anybody I’d care to be buddies with. However, as a public school teacher, let me tell you that I’ve seen pleeeeenty of neglectful and abusive parents. What they don’t do is tote their young children around to craft fairs in neighboring towns. What they don’t do is hand make clothing for their children and take an active interest in their hair and their dress and their time. Abusive and neglectful parents tend to just not give a crap about the well being of their children. I read somewhere that her mother claims all Rachel’s whimsical tales of coloring herself with the brown crown as a child just flat out did not happen. You know what, I believe that. I believe that a child who never even laid eyes on a black person until age ten absolutely did not spend her excruciating childhood where she worked from dusk til dawn (but somehow found time and access to unlimited art supplies to create intricate self portraits, even though her parents are so neglectful...) drawing herself as a black girl. Therefore, it made me feel that many of her claims are either completely wrong, remembered incorrectly, or she has such a low opinion of her parents, she simply isn’t willing to attribute anything positive to them. She shamelessly berates the fact that her dad bopped his head improperly to the music (guess the guy didn’t have that rhythm that Rachel claims only black people, and her, have) instead of describing this as an instance her father tried to have a little fun with her in the car? Let’s talk more about contradictions. She discusses how racist it was for people to “paw at” the hair of her black siblings numerous times. But she also discusses an instance where a black child stroked the long silky hair of a white woman and seems disappointed by her own hair, and the white woman did nothing to console the child. (Don’t worry though, hero Rachel, who reads everyone’s minds, and knows exactly what is going on in the head of every person in every situation, did console the poor kid!) So, strangers touching black hair=wrong and racist. But black people touching white people’s hair=OK, and a sign that they feel victimized and violated by said white person. Check. Got it. *eye roll* Listen, my daughter and I are both white with extremely long hair. We both have had stranger’s hands in our hair, without our permission, all our lives. People of every race just about, have ran their hands through my hair and hers. As a teacher of young people, hands in my hair is an every single day thing now. I don’t like it. I have never liked it. How about we stop reading so much into it, and everybody just keep their grubby mits out of everybody’s hair? Alright? Cultural appropriation. BOY is Rachel still significantly confused about this topic. Her WHOLE book is all about how and why it is perfectly fine for her to present herself as black, but she has SO MANY complaints about her ex husband who, according to her, wanted to be white. Um. Hold on a minute. It’s fine for her to want to be black, but for him, it makes him basically this evil d-bag? At the tail end of her marriage she suddenly claims there was physical abuse, but the rest of it she portrayed as your typical coo coo bird religious bs that she voluntarily submitted to and most of her animosity stemmed from him wanting to be white, and forcing her to be white. Me thinks Ms. Rachel hates white people. At one point she actually states that she doesn’t view life with a white point of view. That comment actually infurfriated me. Yes. You. Do. Maybe you are an empathetic white person. Maybe you sympathize with the plight of other cultures (or at least one other culture), but you surely do view life through the lens of a white person. You might hate white people all day long, but yes, that is your point of view. When I finally had to just delete this nonsense from my kindle, was when she describes her alleged date rape under the influence of GHB. After a lengthy diatribe about the experience in which she basically felt she had no chance of winning in a court battle, she ends it with deciding to just drop the charges because she didn’t want to harm her civil rights advocacy goals by opening up a “black man rapes white woman” narrative. Woah. What? Is this woman seriously so obsessed with black people that she’s willing to be subjected to ingesting drugs and being brutalized just to avoid saying something negative about a black person?!?!?! What about your rights as a female? What about MY rights as a female? What about human rights? It became clear to me that this image of “Blackness” that is sooooo important to her trumps everything else. I can find no admiration or compassion for this person. Her advocacy does NOT come from a sincere or genuine place. She has made tremendous mistakes and continues to do so with an utter inability to see ANY flaw within herself. She will rake her parents back and forth and back and forth over the coals, but she has thrust her own children into a dangerous sort of limelight, and she fights tooth and nail to keep them there. When they grow up and turn on her as she has turned on her own parents, she will throw her own kids under the bus as well. Because that’s who she is, in full color.