You may remember the name Rachel Dolezal. She’s the woman who resigned as an NAACP chapter head in 2015 after her parents revealed that she was not black as she claimed, but white. What you may not know is that far from chastened, Dolezal has doubled down, calling herself “unapologetically black.” In fact, she apparently fancies herself a persecuted pioneer.
What’s more, she has a point — if you accept our time’s fashionable premises (more on this later).
Of course, racial (and ethnic and religious) fakery is common today. There’s Muslim activist Raquel Saraswati, who, her mother says, is actually white and of European descent. There’s Congressman George Santos, who claimed to be Jewish before clarifying that he really meant “Jew-ish” (he gets the George Costanza Award for effort). There are all the “Pretendians,” such as Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), “Sacheen Littlefeather,” author Erika Wurth, disgraced ex-professor Ward Churchill, Queens University professor Robert Lovelace, and the academic Sami Chen. Then there are other black-by-popular-demand types, such as “racial justice activist” Satchuel Cole, University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student CV Vitolo-Haddad, George Washington University history professor Jessica Krug, and (possibly) left-wing activist Shaun King.
As with many or even all of the above, Dolezal advantaged herself via her identity lie. Sometimes calling herself Nkechi Amare Diallo, she parlayed her faux blackness into not just her NAACP chapter headship, but also an “Africana studies” instructor position at Eastern Washington University. She lost these posts and more after being exposed.
Again, though, Dolezal is unrepentant. As The Independent’s Holly Baxter wrote Friday:
In a 2019 Netflix documentary, The Rachel Divide — four years after she’d been outed by her family — Dolezal described herself as “unapologetically Black”. Her sons expressed sadness that she had been held to account. The documentary provided some evidence for why Dolezal might have chosen to identify so strongly with a community that is not her own — she grew up with a number of adopted Black siblings, while her own biological family largely rejected her; she found positive reinforcement and camaraderie while advocating for Black people in her former home of Spokane, Washington — but the inconvenient truth was that she hurt a lot of people by masquerading as something she was not. Real Black people lost out on heading up that chapter of the NAACP or teaching on “the Black woman’s experience” at Eastern Washington University. They want her to be able to see that. Defiant, Dolezal continues to respond that she is a real Black person, too.
Yet she did more than just “identify” as black. Dolezal also told lies about her background, including that a black man was her father and an adopted black brother was her son. The natural reaction to her following of her prevarication with pluck is outrage. But not so fast.
Consider a point Dolezal made in the second episode of a podcast (Peripheries) she launched. As related by Baxter:
Dolezal … positions “transracialism” as a revolutionary new social justice movement. “You know, for kids we say: It’s okay to be different, think for yourself, be free, don’t let anybody bully you, be yourself, follow your heart,” she says. “We don’t tell kids, like, follow your body. We say follow your heart, right? And then, when kids become adults, it seems like on social media and just in society, we kind of cheer on the bullies and insist that everybody has to conform to categories and boxes or face this cancel culture or social punishment, jokes, shaming and that kind of thing. And I think that as a society and a human race, we really need to kind of decide: Which one is it? Are we going to cheer on the unique individuals who dare not to fit into a mold and are going to pioneer their own path or are we going to cheer on the bullies who punish them for deviating from what others think they should be?”
Dolezal’s logic is airtight — if you accept today’s fashionable premises. She’s right, too: We do need to decide: Which one is it?
Do we insist on recognizing reality?
Or do we accept identity-born fantasy?
And if you think “transracialism” is more ridiculous than “transgenderism,” realize that the genetic differences between the sexes are greater than those among the races. Moreover, widespread racial fakery greatly predates widespread sexual fakery; in fact, it has long been institutionalized.
Consider: Baxter lamented that because of Dolezal’s masquerade, losing out on positions were “real black people.” But who would they be?
“Real black people” such as Barack Obama, who was called “our first black president” despite having had a white mother? Or maybe “real black people” such as ex-CNN host Don Lemon, who, though apparently identifying Shaun King as a racial impostor, calls himself black but is part Creole and Scots-Irish?
Do realize that the very Caucasian-looking Dolezal could only masquerade as black in the first place because Americans have been conditioned to accept the “one-drop rule,” where a person barely “black” at all — and who appears white — can “identify” as black and be considered so. Hence the controversy over these Appalachian people.
To be clear, I’m not condemning Lemon, Obama, or other such individuals who instinctively embrace our society’s racial-categorization norms.
I’m condemning those norms — because they reflect intellectual dishonesty.
If we’re to discuss race, it should be done accurately. Commendably, golfer Tiger Woods does this when labeling himself “Cablinasian,” a portmanteau of Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian.
The bottom line is that if we accept today’s identity-is-reality standard, Dolezal has a point. After all, if Obama can be all black and ignore a white half, why can’t she be all black and ignore two of them?
