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The Meaninglessness of “Lived Experience”: on Jessica Krug, Rachel Dolezal, and Passing as Black
In the eyes of racists and antiracists alike, Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal are white women who passed as black. Racists laugh at them because racists think any white person who wants to be black is a fool. Antiracists hate them because Krug and Dolezal reveal the meaninglessness of “lived experience”, the notion antiracists cite when they can’t cite facts.
“Lived experience” assumes we all have social identities that are either privileged or oppressed, and people of an oppressed social identity are experts on their social identity purely because they have lived as oppressed members of their social identity. In the antiracist model, the most blatant privileged social identities are white and male, and the most blatant oppressed social identities are black and female.
Today, the transgender rights movement says people who identify as male or female should live as members of the gender that feels right to them. As a longtime believer in live and let live, I agree. But there is no transracial rights movement. The same people who say race is a social construct insist we all must live within that construct.
And therefore they have to hate Krug and Dolezal, who chose to have “lived experiences” that felt right to them rather than “lived…
