Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who passed as black, told the world this week, “I identify as black.” Despite her resignation as president of NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, the uproar over her racial deception has not subsided.
And in light of Caitlyn Jenner’s recent public declaration that she’s really a woman and not a man, the issue of identity has become a national conversation. What is it about Dolezal’s case that fascinates so many people?
CNN Opinion invited authors and activists to weigh in with their views.
Tara Setmayer: The dangers of lionizing a liar
Up is now down. Left is now right. And apparently, orange isn’t the new black; white is, in the bizarre world of Rachel Dolezal, simply because she says so.
For days, the black intelligentsia and media have been debating all sides of Dolezal’s deceptive behavior. On MSNBC, Professor Michael Eric Dyson claimed Dolezal, a white woman, is culturally “blacker” than African-American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, among other ridiculous racial assertions.
MSNBC host Melissa Harris Perry contemplated whether Dolezal could actually be black, despite being born to Caucasian parents of Czech and German decent. Seriously?! It seems like rationalizing the absurd has become a pastime of the Left.
One thing is perfectly clear: Rachel Dolezal is a liar. She created a complex world of delusion and deception that she perpetrated for years. Whether that delusion stems from white guilt of the nth degree or some other pathology, it’s dangerous to lionize a liar.
Although she resigned from her post as the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, the organization seemingly brushed off the controversy, claiming they “aren’t concerned with the racial identity of their leadership.” OK. But shouldn’t lack of honesty be of concern? Does integrity even matter anymore? Apparently, not as long as you’re ideologically aligned.
An acceptance of an “anything goes because I feel like it” attitude is a recipe for disaster for a civil society. Are we now living in a world where absolute truths no longer exist? Where do we draw the line? We better figure that out soon before the Rachel Dolezals of the world become the new norm.
Tara Setmayer is a former communications director for U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher and a CNN political commentator.
Jeff Yang: Who really has white privilege?
Rachel Dolezal’s case mashes all the right buttons in an era where the rising tide of diversity is reshaping established institutions and challenging conventional concepts of culture and identity, as well as inclusion and belonging.
For some white Americans, Dolezal is a validation of the highly suspect notion that melanin is a social advantage, and that “minorities” now have access to privileges that Caucasian counterparts do not.
For many black Americans and other people of color, she is an example of how the shadow of white entitlement extends over just about every aspect of life in America — how it shrouds even the ability to determine the bounds of one’s own culture and community rather than have it defined by the whims of others.
Dolezal is a distraction. Our country’s problems with race run far deeper with much greater consequences for people risking more than just public embarrassment. And even that is suspect where Dolezal is concerned: There have been reports that she’s fielding offers for a reality TV show, and other commentators note that her newly found celebrity status is likely to pay off at least in the form of a healthy book contract.
But she’s an understandable distraction, and not the first or the last that we’ll see as we head to the imminent tipping point of a “majority minority” America.
Jeff Yang is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal Online and contributes frequently to radio shows, including Public Radio International’s “The Takeaway” and WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” He is the co-author of “I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action” and editor of the graphic novel anthologies “Secret Identities” and “Shattered.”
Jess Row: The best possible outcome
I hope the reason Rachel Dolezal is gripping America is because we’re taking the moment to consider the absurdity, arbitrariness, and psychological violence of racism.
When Dolezal changed her hair and darkened her skin, she was “lying about a lie,” as Jelani Cobb puts it aptly in the New Yorker. She was replacing one convenient narrative with another.
One way of understanding racism is that it makes us shy away from complexity, from awkwardness, from the sight of a white mother with black children, from questions like, “Where did you get her?” or “Where are you really from?”
But the truth is that we are all related and subject to our own strange, interwoven desires. It doesn’t mean we should act on, or even validate, those desires. Perhaps by encountering this story of deception and denial — which it is, no matter how well-intentioned — we can become more comfortable with not hiding from one another. That would be the best possible outcome.
Jess Row is the author of the novel “Your Face in Mine” and two collections of short stories, “The Train to Lo Wu” and “Nobody Ever Gets Lost.”
Sophia Nelson: The raw nerve that Dolezal struck
The reason “Ms. Rachel” (as I like to call her) grates on our nerves so badly as black women, is because she represents hundreds of years of us being invisible, and white women being heard.
It is the classic case of the white female archetype who rescues the black woman from danger, like in “The Long Walk Home” starring Whoopi Goldberg and Cissy Spacek, or who tells our story like in “The Help” starring Viola Davis and Emma Stone. The black women’s voices are muted while the white women’s voices are not.
Black women and white women have a complicated relationship. It dates back to slavery, when we were the property of white women, through the Jim Crow era as we worked as maids to white women, and up to present day as we now serve as managers and protégées of white women. When we see Ms. Rachel with her kinky hair and fake bronze skin, it shakes us to our core.
This kind of imitation is not a form of flattery. It’s modern day blackface. It’s a costume. It’s a cheap imitation.
And the true insult to injury for many of us is that Ms. Rachel has now been allowed on a national and global TV platform to give voice to our black experience. Yet, real black women are often tossed about like a political football when it suits others to climb on our backs so that they can stand up.
If a white woman can pretend to be us, and be given a voice to speak for us and our experiences as a black woman, what do we have left? In a world that stereotypes us as angry, loud, too much of this and not enough of that, Rachel Dolezal proves once again that really we still don’t exist.
Sophia A. Nelson is an author and journalist. Her new book is “The Woman Code: 20 Powerful Keys to Unlock Your Life.”
Simon Moya-Smith: Blackface gets attention, redface is ignored
Rachel Dolezal has faced intense criticism for claiming to be black. But lest we forget, she and her estranged parents also claimed to be part Native American. Dolezal even went so far as to say she was born in a teepee and used to hunt with a bow and arrow.
The truth of the matter is that claiming American Indian identity is so commonplace that rarely do people scrutinize it.
What is most vexing about Dolezal’s case is that being blackface is questioned whereas being redface goes ignored.
Amid all the discussions of posing as black and assuming the race of others, the Chicago Blackhawks Stanley Cup victory on Monday produced a flood of fans in literal redface and faux Indian headdresses.
They were playing Indian. But where’s the outrage over that?
While a sports fan’s behavior may have different intentions, both the wannabe and the fan in redface make a mockery of another race.
If we’re going to speak out against blackface, we must also speak out against redface. Pretending to be black is widely perceived as outrageous, yet pretending to be redface continues to be celebrated as a tradition and a form of honoring Native Americans. That makes no sense.
Simon Moya-Smith is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and culture editor at Indian Country Today. Follow him on Twitter @Simonmoyasmith.
Michaela Angela Davis: Dolezal’s cultural colonization
The Rachel Dolezal spectacle is anything but funny; for many, it’s reprehensible and painful. It disturbed me on multiple levels.
As a light skinned black woman, I found Dolezal’s deception disgustingly disrespectful to the complex, brutal and heroic story of my actual black experience — a slap in the face to my courageous black, white and indigenous ancestors.
My grandfather was a masterful storyteller. He painted vivid pictures of his childhood in Sumpter, South Carolina, during the Jim Crow era. His stories and memories were real. Like the time his father stood on his porch, shotgun in hand and in defiance of a group of KKK members on horseback who rode by in the middle of the night intent on killing him for having an Irish wife.
When Rachel Dolezal said she “owned the black experience,” I, along with so many others, were enraged not only because real blacks live with relentless threat of violence and death, but she sought to take our actual stories, our story of resistance and survival.
When black women like Renisha McBride get killed, how can a white person claim to “own” black experience?
My mama was right: “One thing she can never own are our ancestors.”
Michaela Angela Davis, a writer and activist, was the executive fashion, beauty and culture editor at Essence, editor-in-chief of Honey magazine and fashion director for Vibe magazine.
Dean Obeidallah: Will controversy change things?
Look, we all know controversies about race get people talking. But when you add to that already provocative topic a woman who is white, claiming to be black and served as the head of a local chapter of the NAACP, it’s a recipe for astonishment.
Is she a con artist? Does she actually believe she’s black? Is she delusional? On the heels of Caitlyn Jenner’s transgender change, many asked whether a person can be transracial. Just about everyone has strong opinions about race and we all want to be heard.
The real question is: Will Dolezal’s story help us bridge the racial divide or better understand the social construct of identity? That would be a step forward, but it’s not a probable outcome. In all likelihood she will simply be cited for years to come as a cautionary tale about not assuming that a person is the race she claims to be.
Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM’s weekly program “The Dean Obeidallah Show.” He is a columnist for The Daily Beast and editor of the politics blog The Dean’s Report. Follow him on Twitter: @TheDeansreport.
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