Note: This post is partly tongue-in-cheek, partly serious.
Racial dysphoria is the condition where your racial identity does not match your assigned race at birth. According to one study there are more than 35,000 new cases each year in the US.
- Examples: passing for White, wiggers, New Blacks, “I’m just human”, being universal, Lacey Schwartz, etc.
- Not examples: blackface entertainers, Fake Indians, Black sock puppets, Rachel Dolezal, etc.
Rachel Dolezal argued she was “transracial”. Court records, though, show that she considered herself White. Being born White and considering yourself White is not a case of racial dysphoria. The same goes for blackface entertainers and the rest.
What it is like: Two excellent examples of what racial dysphoria is like:
- “Black Like Me” (1961) by John Howard Griffin. He was a White man who lived as a Black man for six weeks in the US South in 1959. His book describes what it is like to be in a body of the wrong race. The book is, if anything, understated since Griffin always knew he could go back to being White. Joshua Solomon repeated his experiment in 1994 and lasted only one week.
- “Skin” (2008), a British film starring Sophie Okonedo about the true-life story of Sandra Laing. She was assigned White under apartheid in South Africa but looked mixed-race. No ruby slippers for her.
WABABs: Whites Assigned Black at Birth. The remainder of this post takes as an example those Whites in the US who were assigned Black at birth.
Signs and symptoms:
- Not feeling right in your own skin.
- A wish to be White that never completely goes away.
- Looking in the mirror and being unhappy with your appearance in ways that are particular to race: your nose might be too wide, your lips too big, your hair too curly, your skin too dark, etc.
- Preferring the company of Whites over Blacks.
- Race-variant behaviours, like mountain climbing, wearing shorts in winter, kissing dogs on the mouth.
- Using a White avatar online or in video games.
These are just examples: you might experience none of these and still be racially dysphoric. Or you might be suffering from internalized racism.
Treatment:
- Limited. The US in the early twenty-first century has no race therapists, no race reassignment surgeries, no skin whiteners that are safe for long-term use, etc. And what little treatment there is, is not covered by health insurance since racial dysphoria is not recognized by doctors as a disorder in need of a cure. Sorry, but you were born into the wrong period of history.
Some patients are left with the cold comfort of being told, “God does not make mistakes.”
Others, though, are able to transition on their own without medical help. And surgeries do help to a degree.
Note that transitioning goes beyond mere physical appearance. Those who transition often have to move to another town, talk and dress a certain way, say little about their past, and maybe even change their name.
– Abagond, 2018.
See also:
- internalized racism / colourism
- gender dysphoria
- drapetomania – what runaway slaves suffered from
- The Wigger Fallacy – what wiggers suffer from
- skin lightening
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Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
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Hilarious. Let’s see if you can get away with such ‘bigoted’ attitude toward the sexually dysphoric. John Howard Griffin was black for pay so his claim is weaker than Dolezal’s.
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kissing dogs on the mouth.
That sounds like beastiality. Are you conflating the two, racial dysphoria and beastiality?
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Sadly, Black people suffer from this dysfunction as well.
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Michael Jackson and Lil Kim the female rapper.
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a lot of white people let their dogs all over the couch, etc, i had to wait for an extremely untrained mostly pitty today to ‘finish eating’ before i could go in, and i have seen several online profiles of white women with dogs, dog lover, etc, and even one was a white woman kissing a dog i think dogs are gross but maybe i would get one a medium pitty is a good paceing timer for me well idk i think their gross though, the dogs, about 6 or 7 black cats in a row came to me but that streak ended when i got locked up last time, wow
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that’s funny the w-word is referenced here, a deprecated thread, kinda passe, damn i need to use diacritical marks on this stupid thing, and also, well everyone knows my name regarding the hood, i have noone come over ever, and i think i’m white pretty sure, i got sunburnt today
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she calls me the n word,alot, usually when she’s mad, i do not
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I’ve tried to find myself anywhere on this list 🙂 Well, I’m definately comfortable with my current Caucasian body and its ‘white’ skin. And I’m too old for a ‘wigger’, though there is a substantial stratum of Russian hip-hop and reggae music within a culture of this country. I never liked rap or hip-hop, and I lost my taste for reggae, soca or callypso many years ago— although I’m not so sure about Harry Belafonte’s music.
In the country where I had been born, a race never mattered. Even a ‘Mongolian VS Caucasian’ difference never did, not even under Mongolian conquest, so I identify myself with my religion, not with a nationality or race. It’s not like ‘being universal’, because there are sentient being other than humans, and there are humans who adhere to what is known as logically false views.
I make judgement on other humans first on the views they adhere to and, second, on how their vital energies are compatible (or otherwise) with mine, that’s why I like to spend some of my Internet time here on this blog.
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When you think you have already seen everything you are suddenly taken by surprise. Look at this: a Black girl believing and insisting she is White…
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsgoHo2j05g)
This case makes me remember something or someone. I’m not sure… maybe:
— Rachel Dolezal (in reverse, obviously)
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I don’t agree with your examples. Those examples have more to do with internal racism, self hate and racial identity and fitting into society. Not, believing you were assigned the wrong race. Black like me was a social experiment just like the experiment where a women went undercover as a man. Skin was a black woman who was born to white parents that had African ancestry during the apartheid era and was dealing with her own racial identity.
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