A sluggish reboot
Up early and eating porridge with Lorraine. I felt I was beginning again today, albeit it is a very sluggish reboot, a week after Janet died. The gruelling challenges of the last month or so done with, I now have to start getting things done, but my energy is low and I feel thin-skinned. The news all about climate catastrophe. I had two walks, loving the autumn colours despite a dreary day, and regained control of my desk and my in-basket, and threw things in bins. This seemed to be enough for the first day. I found I couldn't face thinking about where I'm going to get my next bit of freelance work from, let alone my own writing.
I watched a Netflix documentary about Rachel Dolezal called The Rachel Divide. It is a case that picks at the running sores of identity and has interested me for a while. Rachel is a white American woman, whose abusive and highly-religious parents adopted lots of black kids. Hating her white parents and band protecting her adopted brothers and sisters, she began to identify with black people so much that she took on their identity, and began passing for black, to the extent that she led her local black community organisation, and came to the attention of the local media by claiming she had been the victim of an extraordinary number of hate crimes. Eventually her white parents were found by the media, and the identity she had chosen was outed as false. Much to the ridicule of all and sundry, and the particular ire of black people. This case highlights the confusion around identity politics at the moment: if gender fluidity is becoming more normalised, then why not racial fluidity?
I cooked this evening, which I enjoyed, and had food on the table for Lorraine the minute she got home. We sat listening to music tonight, and both shattered, headed for bed at a very early nine o'clock.
I watched a Netflix documentary about Rachel Dolezal called The Rachel Divide. It is a case that picks at the running sores of identity and has interested me for a while. Rachel is a white American woman, whose abusive and highly-religious parents adopted lots of black kids. Hating her white parents and band protecting her adopted brothers and sisters, she began to identify with black people so much that she took on their identity, and began passing for black, to the extent that she led her local black community organisation, and came to the attention of the local media by claiming she had been the victim of an extraordinary number of hate crimes. Eventually her white parents were found by the media, and the identity she had chosen was outed as false. Much to the ridicule of all and sundry, and the particular ire of black people. This case highlights the confusion around identity politics at the moment: if gender fluidity is becoming more normalised, then why not racial fluidity?
I cooked this evening, which I enjoyed, and had food on the table for Lorraine the minute she got home. We sat listening to music tonight, and both shattered, headed for bed at a very early nine o'clock.
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