UNCLE JOHNNY SYNDROME

     What is identity and how fluid is it? Now that we hunters have a holiday break I will have nothing to report from the woods. So my experiences will be limited to what humans have been up to online as well as in the hood. It seems that since I've been in the woods identity politics, and all that come with it, has been raging unabated. What sex are you? What party are you? What is your occupation? Are you are citizen? How do you identify racially? Did you serve in the military? How many white supremacy organizations have you friended on facebook? Are you vaccinated? Have you tested positive? What race were your birth parents?

   I just watched Laura Brownson's 2018 film on Rachel Dolezal The Rachel Divide on Netflix. Dolezal is the white woman who passed for black and became the Spokane, Washington NAACP President. Once exposed as having been born to two white parents Rachel's identification as "black" becomes problematic and the film follows the unraveling. The film takes a pretty even-handed, unflinching look at Rachel Dolezal, her black children and mixed race baby. Widely vilified as a "fake," and "cultural appropriator" by the black community, Dolezal sticks by her identity guns and never wavers in her insistence that she should be allowed to identify as any race she pleases. She sees herself as black. End of discussion. Her "trans-racial" argument is surprisingly similar to my attempt at "trans-species" identification as "Mammalien." The difference being that there are no Mammaliens on the planet who were enslaved by people who look just like Rachel and her parents and would argue the point.

    Did Rachel Dolezal do good work as a Black Lives Matter activist and NAACP functionary, all the while lying to her community? Absolutely. People can lie to themselves and others quite effectively and simultaneously do good works.. My Uncle Johnny Osterhout was a perfect example. He came back from Vietnam as a Green Beret. As the years went by he became an advocate for Vietnam Veteran's rights and was named the Grand Marshall of the Veteran''s Day Parade in New Windsor. Another vet read about Uncle Johnny's war record in Vietnam and a few things didn't add up. Major John Osterhout's identity was as a proud, patriotic, war hero and activist. He unarguably also did good work for vets. Then, his whole world of complex lies unraveled. He was not a Green Beret. He never served in Vietnam. He was in the U.S. Army in 1963. That was about the extent of it. His less than impressive real identity was soon discovered. It was too late. Within months Uncle Johnny died of Louie Gehrig's Disease. He didn't know or care who he was by then.

    Rachel Dolezal reminds me of Uncle Johnny and a little of the white journalist and author of Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin. The major difference being that Griffin (after darkening his skin) passed as a black man among hostile, racist white people in the South, not in a trusting black community in Spokane who now rightly feel duped. Like those trusting, battle-scarred, PTSD ridden Vietnam Vets, how could a woman born white know a life under fire on the battlefield as a black woman? In the end Rachel Dolezal has the same syndrome as Uncle Johnny. Something is cross wired and logic or even overwhelming social media shame by trolling critics won't change Rachel's mind. In her mind she is black. In Uncle Johnny's mind he was a war hero. It would seem a waste of breath to convince either otherwise.