Tongues are wagging over the disclosure that Rachel Dolezal sued Howard University for discriminating against her as a white person. But this is a matter of applying outdated concepts like reality and consistency to the new postmodern era the progressively left has proclaimed and ruthlessly enforces. Ms. Dolezal is the pin-up girl for progressive postmodernism.

First, consider that is now official policy in many government schools of the United States that a child can decide one day to be a boy and use the boys’ bathroom. But on the next day, it (“he” or “she” is too constraining a pronoun to use) can decide to use the girls’ room.  The principle that an emotional state of being trumps biology is thus accepted at an operational level by progressive government bodies.

So why can’t Rachel be a white person one day, or for one purpose, and a black person on another day? For that matter, why can’t she be a black guy? Postmodernism, which began as a school of literary analysis, denies that there are any truths, only “texts” or assertions, which are nothing more than what a group wishes to proclaim as a means of enforcing its power. And as far as American culture is concerned today, the postmoderns have won, with Caitlyn Jenner the very prominent evidence that the commanding heights of media and academia will accept as a woman someone with penis and a y chromosome in every cell of his body.

Whenever I want to find out what the progressives proclaim the rest of us should think or do, I immediately turn to Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC. And sure enough, last weekend she let us known that in fact Rachel may be authentically black.

And since this based on a self concept and emotions, which are subject to change, why she can also be authentically white. It is all so progressive!

Meanwhile, as we detach ourselves from reality, don’t worry.  The Chinese are not bothering with any of this. They are building their military might and economic muscle, all based on pre-postmodern concepts. After all, as I wrote more than a decade ago:

The Rectification of Names' is a term familiar to all historians of China, reflecting one of the essential precepts of Confucianism. Confucius, one of the greatest political thinkers in the history of the world, taught that if names are not correct, words will be misused, and when words are misused, nothing can be on a sound footing. Political reformers of corrupt dynasties often crusaded under the political banner of The Rectification of Names.

The Chinese understand that you screw yourself up badly when you start calling things what they aren’t, as if changing the name to something acceptable changes the reality. This was how dynasties declined and ultimately fell – sometimes to foreign conquerors.