JOUR 302 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Rachel Dolezal, 87Th Academy Awards, Women In Algeria
26 Feb 2019
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Document Summary
As summer began in 2015, the american news media were abuzz, deconstructing rachel. Nbc"s the today show scored a scoop by landing the first interview with the former president of the national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp) chapter in. The controversy ignited when dolezal was outed as a white woman passing as african american with the aid of dark foundation make-up and creative hairstyling. These two news items force us to address some crucial issues of racial epistemology related to essentialism, representation, and history. Rejecting biological essentialism on political and intellectual grounds is strategically understandable, but defining race in purely discursive terms renders dolezal and crowe"s decisions unproblematic, when according to many, they are plainly not. More importantly, these cases demonstrate how uncannily and often cinema, of all the arts, presents us with a parallel cultural realm to work through social and political dilemmas.
