Dolezal, Warren, Obama And The Psychology Of Dupes

One of the interesting aspects of the Rachel Dolezal controversy is how it was largely shrugged off by black leaders. How in the world did this woman hide in plain sight? Even with unstraightened hair Dolezal looked German/Swedish/Czech. This is the trick where the magician pulls an invisible rabbit out of his hat and the crowd voices their approval. What a cunning array of stunts that magic man offers.

Once more, if you submitted the Rachel Dolezal story to a movie studio, it would get shot down. Not credible. Not believable. John Howard Griffin consumed large doses of methoxsalen and spent as much as fifteen hours a day under an ultraviolet light to pass as a black man in 1959. Rachel Dolezal affected a bad attitude and rose to the rank of president of the Spokane Chapter of the NAACP. No one with a brain would buy this story. "Saturday Night Live" would have a hard time working a premise as silly as this.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is almost as convincing as a Native American. Apparently she used her fake-Indian status to its full affirmative action benefit, parlaying her minority status to the Harvard faculty and onward to the US Senate. She too, pulled the wool over a lot of eyes (without using much wool either) and her fraudulence was also met with a collective shrug.

Which brings us to Barack Obama. Everything about this man is fraudulent. Everything. He is a man of modest talent and an unimpressive intellect (though I have been told he can crease slacks like no one's business) and until he was fast-tracked to the White House, he was a man of meager achievement. Expose his flimflam and what do you get? More shrugs.

Why the mass indifference? People do not like to be told they have been duped. We have all been conned either in love or finances or in some other way. It is part of the human condition. But man, is it humiliating!

A victim of fraud, especially on who has been conned by someone they love and trust, is bewildered. It dawns on them that they cannot trust their own judgment. Some victims can never admit they have been had. They will try to downplay their own foolishness. They will often turn their hostility on the party who reveals the fraud. It is tough for the victim to admit their own culpability, their own naïvete.

Let the backlash begin. The vast right wing conspiracy is just not comfortable with a black man in the White House, a smart woman in the Senate or a white woman in the NAACP. Haters.