White US professor admits she has pretended to be Black for years
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I remember reading pre-internet John Howard Griffin who wrote Black Like Me, died from cancer from turning his skin black.
But checking, no - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dead-like-me/
There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label -- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...
As we harvest ever more human genomes one fact remains unshakeable: race does not exist -- https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/01/racism-scien...
I have not lived a double life. There is no parallel form of my adulthood connected to white people or a white community or an alternative white identity. I have lived this lie, fully, completely, with no exit plan or strategy. -- https://medium.com/@jessakrug/the-truth-and-the-anti-black-v...
It seems society itself viewed her as Black. So based on race being a social construct, wouldn't that make her Black? If not, on what basis then isn't she Black? Certainly not ancestry, because:
Just 3,400 years ago, the entire population of the Earth were the ancestors of everyone alive today. -- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/30/how-to-argue-w...
No, that's not what a “social construct” means. Social constructs still have socially constructed rules, and the social construct of race is mostly based around the race socially ascribed to your ancestors. (There's a newer complementary or competing coexisting construct that has a greater contribution from self-identity, as well, but even that one still has a significant contribution from ascribed race of ancestors.) In her case, neither her ancestry nor her genuine self-identity were black, she was viewed as back only based on her false presentation of both of those points.
The real thing about race being a social construct is better expressed by Dubois: "the black man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia." That is, you can't discuss race without understanding that it's nothing more than a psuedoscience designed to enforce a hereditary and geopolitical caste system - discussing it taxonomically is a sucker's game.
So while Krug might have been able to successfully lie about being black (while also styling her hair/makeup to make the ancestry more plausible), that doesn't mean very much when she actually spent her life at the front of the bus.
EDIT: On race being "oppression first, ancestry later," see also former NAACP leader Walter Francis White, whose recent ancestors were mostly European but whose parents were both "clearly" black. White himself was blonde and had blue eyes, and he often went undercover as a white man. From Wikipedia[3, racist slur censored for HN friendliness]:
> Granted press credentials from the Chicago Daily News, White gained an interview with Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough, who would not have met with him as the NAACP representative. Brough gave White a letter of recommendation to help him meet people and his autographed photograph.
> Learning that his identity was discovered, White was in Phillips County briefly before taking the first train back to Little Rock. The conductor told him that he was leaving "just when the fun is going to start" because they had found out that there was a "damned yellow nr down here passing for white and the boys are going to get him." Asked what they would do to him, the conductor told White, "When they get through with him he won't pass for white no more!" "High yellow" was a term used at the time to refer to black people of mixed-racial descent and visible European features.
[1] https://twitter.com/GrahamStarr/status/1301567380313829381
Only the part before she started "pretending". Lets say she pretended for 10 years. Does 10 years of Black lived experience make her as Black as a 10 year old Black child? And trans-women? Do they not count as women if they transition too late? Picking some arbitrary age before which you have to be seen as X by society to count as really X seems just that - arbitrary, and very inconsistently applied.