In a word it’s been week of stupid utterances

I am mildly aggrieved that nobody told me it was International Say Something Stupid Week. And yet what a week of utterances it has been. All kinds of stupid, which for the purposes of this column I will condense into three: Political Stupid, Academic Stupid, and WTF Stupid.

Political Stupid has been brought to us this week by Donald Trump’s hair, which is running for the presidency again, in the belief that as the owner of $8 billion, it will be able to buy the job. Then Donald, whose brain has long been controlled by this sinister artificial life form masquerading as the hair, will build a giant wall along the American border , because the hair has told Donald to say out loud that “Mexicans are rapists.” The hair will invoice for the wall, as it simultaneously repeals Obamacare. As some wag on Twitter said of Trump’s presidential bid, there will be hell toupee.

Academic Stupid involved the Nobel Prize winning scientist, Tim Hunt, whose turn as a sexist stand-up comedian cost him his job. Women in science laboratories, he told a world conference, tend to cry when you criticise them, when they are not falling in love, or being fallen in love with. Clang. Twitterstorm. P45. You almost felt sorry for him, this elderly academic who, going by his marriage to a senior professor of immunology, most probably regards women as equals and is not particularly sexist at all. Just stupid. And now unemployed.

But the prize for WTF Stupid goes, without qualification, to the ‘black’ white woman, Rachel Dolezal. Not for her admirable and tireless activism within the African American community, but for her inability to differentiate between “identify with” and “identify as.” This Caucasian woman has referred to herself as ‘transracial’, as though ‘transracial’ is an option, a box you can tick. It’s not. You might strongly identify with another race, but you can’t physically join them.

Here’s an example. I am white. My two children are dual heritage, or to use the technical term, brown. So while I identify completely with my children who are a different colour from myself, at no point do I wake up in the morning thinking myself brown, black, or any other colour other than what I am – a sort of pale bluish-grey. And while America’s appalling racial history means it’s obviously a lot deeper than just skin colour, you still can’t skip about calling yourself ‘transracial.’

No matter how well intentioned, no matter how deeply you feel solidarity, empathy, connection with another race, you cannot change your DNA by saying it out loud. You just can’t. Gender, sexual orientation, geographical location, social class, and religion are all fluid to varying degrees, depending on who and where you are – but not race.

Maybe it’s harsh to call Rachel Dolezal stupid. Maybe she’s just daft. But there’s one thing she is definitely not – and that’s black, transracial or anything other than white.