The Eowiggle

Rachel Dolezal is all the buzz today…She is a civil rights activist and a professor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University, as well as a chair of the office of the police ombudsman commission in the city of Spokane and president of its chapter of the African American civil rights organization NAACP. She has regularly spoken out on local media about racial justice ( The Guardian ). Her parents are claiming that she has been misrepresenting herself as black for some time now. You see, Rachel was born Caucasian, the race assigned to her at birth, but because she feels more comfortable in the black community and wants to champion its cause, she has changed herself, even her appearance, in order to become black. Her self-definition as black has caused an outrage because she lied about her identity.  But let’s not miss the irony of our confused times. Dolezal is the product of the same culture as Caitlyn Jenner. Unlike the acclaim Jenner received for having ...

Our neighbor from across the landing in our first Berlin apartment 14 years ago told me about her mother one day. She refuses to go out into gardens for fear of encountering…a rake. You heard me right, not a snake, a rake! I had never heard of a rake phobia before. What could a rake possibly do to a person anyway? A phobia is an overwhelming and unreasonable fear of an object or situation that poses little real danger but provokes anxiety and avoidance (thanks, Mayo Clinic for that definition!). But, of course, like most phobias, the object at stake is just a trigger or a button that, when pushed, sets in motion a whole set of irrational fears linked with the object. She avoided rakes not because she feared stepping on one accidentally and being whacked in the head by its handle as one sees in funny movies. Not because she had stepped on one barefoot one summer and feared a puncture wound on her foot again. The reason is a lot grizzlier than you can imagine. But now I’ve made you cu...