A young woman in Spokane who heads the regional NAACP and who self identifies as black was “outed” by her estranged parents as being white and of German, Czech and English origin, Rachel(her real first name)for the last nine years, has assumed a black activist identity following divorce from a black man.
With no apparent gain in sight (financial or otherwise)her act of assuming a lower status and oft reviled identity has shocked the nation and momentarily gained public attention worthy of that paid to the nationwide policing crisis and the growing pool of presidential candidates.
The country has evidence of what can happen when your card of identity cannot be played within your culture.Rachel is quite competent and not mentally ill.How she acquired identity components that made her unhappy with status occupancy craved by many,if not most; is not essential for us to know but she hasn’t defected to a foreign country and hasn’t signed up for Isis.Those puzzled by the “Isis Phenomenon” among western born persons can observe and learn.
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The Octogenarians 
“Status identity” and “cards of identity”,
This does seem to describe a significant part of the social world. Hitching our emotional wagon to groups seen to have status and establishing traits of identity foment both joy and sometimes various forms of delicious pain. We want to be significant players in the game of life. We want to engage that process with as much meaning as we can embrace OR INVENT. We often do not recognize that those who structured the current social rules of play may have been – or continue to be foolish. Race matters? What divisive mind-set laid down that rule? Why would we choose to play in such a silly, infantile game? Perhaps we had better step aside and create some new rules – some more inspired sets-of-identity that pay bigger dividends for humanity’s future. Some smart people in the eighteenth century already did that but the attractions of the old game continue to seduce too many. The founders created for us a set of rules WHICH IF PRACTICED could shunt into history the primitive enticements of the racist game. They established a rule whereby in the game of life every individual citizen (no matter race affiliation) was supposed to be guaranteed equal rights under the law. That rule was supposed to discourage the allocation of special rights – special rights that provide for so many an opportunity to invent meaning and then play their cherished race-based “cards of identity”.
So, we see pathology when society structures its game-of-life rules to allow quirks of birth to trump measurable achievement. Play by the better rules and those particular “cards of identity” will find their way to the trash bin.
Don Spencer
Reblogged this on daedal2207's Blog and commented:
It is difficult to assert personal power from a base of low status identity that has been conferred from the environs and internalized.It is equally difficult to assert personal power from a base of high status identity conferred by the environs and rejected because of internal conflict,