Posted by:
Tal Bachman
(
)
Date: June 13, 2015 06:23PM
Personal authenticity is highly valued these days in Western society, but sometimes I wonder what it means.
The athlete formerly known as Bruce Jenner recently revealed that for many years, he has believed himself to be a woman. While he says he has no plans to have a sex-change operation, he now takes estrogen, wears make-up and dresses, and refers to himself (or herself) as Caitlyn.
Eastern Washington University professor Rachel Dolezal - a blonde caucasian with freckles - has been passing herself off as half-black for the past decade. To complete the physical transformation, all she had to do was spend lots of time in the tanning booth, smear on dollops of dark skin cream, and find an obviously marvelous hairdresser. But her spiritual transformation (in her mind, anyway) required something else: victimhood. To that end, Miss Dolezal produced racist hate mail supposedly addressed to her - which law enforcement has now said never went through the US Postal service at all, and which, it seems undeniable, Dolezal placed in her own post office box. Through a change in physical appearance and a few choice victimhood stories (albeit fabricated by herself), Dolezal finally felt "truly herself".
This sort of thing has been building up for a while. Singer Michael Jackson felt uncomfortable with who he was for years, and finally attempted to entirely "de-negrify" himself: in the end, he sported white skin, straight hair, and a face surgically denuded of any West African features. He went from being a handsome black man to a cross between Karen Carpenter and the King Tut death mask. Some people thought he was a freak, but Michael felt he was manifesting his true self.
What about Lil' Kim? She used to be a black woman, but surgically turned herself Chinese.
http://thatgrapejuice.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/LIL-KIM-THAT-GRAPE-JUICE.png. She too is happy with her changed state.
Nikki Minaj is mostly ethnic Indian, but for most of her career has masqueraded as a black woman by using make-up and strategic diction adjustments. By contrast, Mariah Carey didn't even admit that she was black until well into her career.
Closer to home, I know one forty-something year old ex-Mormon who, since leaving Mormonism, has not been able to settle on who she is, or should be. She has changed her name (yes, her *first* name) several times now, flitted from one life path to the next almost as quickly as she could imagine new ones, destroyed a number of her most important relationships, keeps moving, and is regularly spotted at parties drunk and sobbing. She has most recently decided that the secret to finding her true self is in getting large, gaudy tattoos. Along the way, she too has had several cosmetic surgeries.
My questions are: What does it really, truly mean to be "oneself"? How can you reliably discern that? Is there a depth at which "self" actually just is immutable? And at what point (if any) can an outsider legitimately conclude that another person really isn't being so much "authentic" as manifesting real psychological dysfunction?
By the way, here is a video clip of one of my own experiments in "transformation". I was supposed to appear as myself on some Christian TV show, but at the last minute, decided to appear as my "new self": British rock star Ian Starglow. I only told the host two minutes before we went on air. (I didn't light the ciggie because I didn't know how to smoke).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5hLrcenCxsEdited 4 time(s). Last edit at 06/14/2015 12:24AM by Tal Bachman.