I’m not sure how many people are familiar with the Rachael Dolezale story. It’s been around in the mainstream media for a couple of years and essentially it’s about a woman from a middle class white background of white parents and lineage extending back four hundred years who says, who insists, that she’s black.
This gets to the heart of this entire phony politics of identity crap and how it’s about all about navel gazing and emoting “how I feel”
As Caroline Overington asks in this column, “Why are we indulging this nonsense?”
“…As a black activist, Rachel had purpose and meaning in her life that she couldn’t find as a boring white person. She had status in the black community, and the respect of black and white peers.
She encouraged the idea that she was part of a larger struggle for human rights in her own life, and in the lives of others in her community. She presented herself as a civil rights leader, taking up a position alongside the great black activists — poets, lawyers, and preachers — who came before her. It made her feel proud.
But she isn’t. She is a fraud. And deep in her heart she knows she’s a fraud. How else to explain the lengths to which she went to trick people, by studiously applying tanner to make her skin darker and braiding her hair…”
“..if race is a construct, then the ability to identify as one race or another must go both ways. But it very clearly doesn’t. Ask yourself this question: could Barack Obama ever be white?
He has a white mother and a black father. He says he’s black, but let’s pretend for now that he has decided to identify as white. Would anyone accept that?
No, they would not. Obama could never be accepted as white, and neither could Muhammad Ali, nor Oprah Winfrey. And if there is no way for Obama — who actually has a white mother — to become white, then there is absolutely no way for Rachel, with her English and German ancestors, to become black.
Freedom of speech and all that. Rachel Dolezal is apparently quite within her rights to identify as a black, but the beauty of that is that we in turn have the right to say what we see when Rachel’s frizzed-up head comes zooming into view.
Which is: you’re a fraud, Rachel. An offensive fraud, and a white one, to boot…” Bad day for racism as Rachel Dolezal changes ethnicity
FULL COLUMN BELOW
“…There is a guy in California who identifies as a tree. I used to see him getting around Santa Monica, wearing brown clothes with twigs in his hair, or else standing completely still, hoping birds would land on him. I was transfixed. The kids were like: meh. If he wants to be a tree, let him be a tree. But is he actually a tree? No.
Which brings me to Rachel Dolezal. You’ll remember Rachel, and if you don’t, go Google her, and you will find a woman with braids piled on her head, who looks as if she spent way too long on the tanning bed.
Rachel’s photographs mostly show her leading Black Lives Matter protests, or she’ll be speaking about racism in the police force, or else she’ll be giving interviews about how she identifies as black.
But Dolezal isn’t black. She has white parents. A genealogist who studied her family tree found white ancestors going back four centuries. She says this doesn’t matter because “how I feel is more important than how I was born”. She feels, on the inside, like a black person, and she has tried to make herself look more like a black person by getting cornrows and self-tanning her skin.
And, amazingly, some people are taking her seriously.
Rachel has been in the news this week because she has published a memoir, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. She has appeared on all the main TV talk show in the US. She has been profiled by The New York Times and The Guardian, where she has expanded her argument about how she identifies as being black.
It’s all been very respectful but at some point, surely, somebody has to ask the question: why are we indulging this nonsense?
Here are the facts: Rachel Dolezal is not black.
For about 10 years, from 2007 onward, she pretended to be black and then she got caught — and all credit to journo Jeff Humphrey, who confronted her in the street, on tape, so she couldn’t get away with it any more — and now she’s spinning like a white-tail spider in her own web of deceit.
Rachel was born and raised in a bog-standard, white suburban American home, with Christian parents who say she’s always had a problem with the truth. Besides Rachel, they adopted four black kids, and at some point Rachel came into contact with an African-American woman in her neighbourhood who specialised in braiding black hair.
Rachel got cornrows and she noticed that people started treating her differently. No longer was she a run-of-the-mill, freckle-face with dirty blonde hair. Suddenly she was exotic. And she liked it. And so she kept on pretending.
As a black activist, Rachel had purpose and meaning in her life that she couldn’t find as a boring white person. She had status in the black community, and the respect of black and white peers.
She encouraged the idea that she was part of a larger struggle for human rights in her own life, and in the lives of others in her community. She presented herself as a civil rights leader, taking up a position alongside the great black activists — poets, lawyers, and preachers — who came before her. It made her feel proud.
But she isn’t. She is a fraud. And deep in her heart she knows she’s a fraud. How else to explain the lengths to which she went to trick people, by studiously applying tanner to make her skin darker and braiding her hair.
Rachel is trying to use her book to explain that away — she made herself up in ways that made her feel beautiful, apparently — but that’s blackface, pure and simple. The sloppiness of her essential argument needs to be called out, too. Rachel says there’s no such thing as race since we all share the same ancestry.
But if that is true, why is she black? It either matters or it does not. If it doesn’t, then she’s not any particular race. She’s just Rachel, the human, which would be fine, but that’s not what she’s saying. She’s saying she’s black.
Also, if race is a construct, then the ability to identify as one race or another must go both ways. But it very clearly doesn’t. Ask yourself this question: could Barack Obama ever be white?
He has a white mother and a black father. He says he’s black, but let’s pretend for now that he has decided to identify as white. Would anyone accept that?
No, they would not. Obama could never be accepted as white, and neither could Muhammad Ali, nor Oprah Winfrey. And if there is no way for Obama — who actually has a white mother — to become white, then there is absolutely no way for Rachel, with her English and German ancestors, to become black.
Which brings us to the matter of lived experience: Rachel says she’s black but at any point she could go back to being white. That is not a privilege extended to those people on the other side of the black-white divide.
And for a very long time that mattered because the back of the bus was for black people. Votes were for white people. Race had a real impact on people’s lives.
Discrimination on the basis of race is now illegal in the US and in Australia but black leaders in both nations will leave you in no doubt that racism continues to shape their lives.
If nothing about race is real — if everyone is, in fact, the same — then there is no racism. Whole arguments, indeed, whole industries, collapse. In which case, Rachel really has belled the cat.
And now let’s take Rachel’s argument one incendiary step further: what would happen if a wholly white Australian announced they were Aboriginal? If they started tanning their skin and frizzing their hair and wearing a kangaroo skin around their shoulders?
The outrage would be tremendous. What if they decided to use their fake claim to Aboriginality to claim specific benefits, Aboriginal government jobs or to set up indigenous corporations, securing grants and donations? This has, in fact, happened, not once but several times and retribution, in term of stripping the fraudsters of their benefits, has been swift.
The US is different. Freedom of speech and all that. Rachel Dolezal is apparently quite within her rights to identify as a black, but the beauty of that is that we in turn have the right to say what we see when Rachel’s frizzed-up head comes zooming into view.
Which is: you’re a fraud, Rachel. An offensive fraud, and a white one, to boot…”