Is anyone really surprised that a white woman living in Eugene, OR has been caught peddling fake memoirs of growing up as a half-Native American orphan, running drugs for the Crips in a Southern California ghetto?

The kind of “street cred” that comes along with a story like that is the wet dream of countless bored, white, middle-class “progressive” types who seem to associate people trapped by poverty, violence, and misery with some sort of authenticity. Remember Ward Churchill’s various chicaneries regarding his military service and supposed Native American heritage? Even more extreme examples include the perverse glorification of the Palestinian “resistance” and breathless assurances that life in Castro’s Cuba is lovely, thanks to 100% literacy and free health care — excuses in both cases proffered by comfy activists much like Margaret Seltzer, who justified her lies by claiming she was “[putting] a voice to people who people don’t listen to.”

If anyone doubts the “authenticity” aspect of all of this, the New York Times excerpts a few bits from her book:

There are “some parts of me that did die in L.A.,” she adds, “and that I’ll never get back, and other parts of me that die daily because I exist away from the city, in a world where people can’t begin to imagine what it was like where I grew up… I made it out of L.A. with what life I had left. ”

Like Ward Churchill’s various pronouncements on the tragedy of Native American history and by-the-numbers declarations of genocide in Gaza by Hamas PR men, Seltzer’s narrative is intended to instill both a sense of shock and reverent awe among the Prius-and-latte set as well as a sense that the world has gone horribly wrong and justice must be restored.

But while her former editor called Ms. Seltzer “very, very naive,” the truth is that Margaret Seltzer was just another comfy charlatan activist who made it her business to profit from the misery of others, supposedly in the service of a “larger truth”.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 14:25 by Vincent and is filed under City, Media, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.