Mixed Race Studies

Rachel Dolezal’s Unintended Gift to America

The New York Times
2015-06-17

Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History
Stanford University

Allyson Hobbs is the author of “A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.”

In James Baldwin’s 1968 novel “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone,” a child points to his light-skinned mother’s relationships to offer a compelling case that she is indisputably black:

“Our mama is almost white … but that don’t make her white. You got to be all white to be white …. You can tell she’s a colored woman because she’s married to a colored man, and she’s got two colored children. Now, you know ain’t no white lady going to do a thing like that.”

For the child in Baldwin’s novel, racial identity was determined by the life one chose to live and the relationships one chose to privilege.

Rachel A. Dolezal evidently believes that she should have the same choice as the light-skinned mother in Baldwin’s novel. Enmeshed in black politics, black communities and black experiences — she is raising two black sons — why should she see herself any other way?

As a historian who has spent the last 12 years studying “passing,” I am disheartened that there is so little sympathy for Ms. Dolezal or understanding of her life circumstances…

…Whiteness is a form of property, the legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris has argued, a privilege that allocated economic, political and social resources along the color line. By passing as white, one could have access to employment opportunities, buy a house in a better neighborhood, and enjoy countless other advantages, like sitting in a more comfortable seat on a train or being addressed as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” One could do more than survive; one could live….

Read the entire article here.

The spectrum of shades and colorings that constitute “black” identity in the United States, and the equal claim to black identity that someone who looks like [Walter] White or [Louis T.] Wright (or, for that matter, [Rachel] Dolezal) can have, is a direct product of bloodlines that attest to institutionalized rape during and after slavery. Nearly all of us who identify as African-American in this country, apart from some more recent immigrants, have at least some white ancestry. My own white great-grandparent is as inconsequential as the color of my palms in terms of my status as a black person in the United States. My grandparents had four children: my father and his brother, both almond-brown, with black hair and dark eyes, and two girls with reddish hair, fair skin, freckles, and gray eyes. All of them were equally black because they were equal heirs to the quirks of chance determining whether their ancestry from Europe or Africa was most apparent. Dolezal’s primary offense lies not in the silly proffering of a false biography but in knowing this ugly history and taking advantage of the reasons that she would, at least among black people, be taken at her word regarding her identity.

Jelani Cobb, “Black Like Her,” The New Yorker, June 15, 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/rachel-dolezal-black-like-her.

Cultural Appropriation

Metro Morning
CBC Toronto
2015-06-16

Matt Galloway, Host

The controversial head of the Spokane, Washington branch of the N.A.A.C.P., Rachel Dolezal, has stepped down from her post. Matt Galloway spoke with Rema Tavares, she is the founder of Mixed in Canada.

Listen to the interview (00:07:21) here.

White people have been passing for black for centuries. A historian explains.

Vox
2015-06-15

Dara Lind, Jetpack Comandante

The story of Rachel Dolezal — the now-former Spokane NAACP president whose parents have claimed she’s white — has opened up an enormously complicated debate about race and identity in general, and blackness in America in particular.

Dolezal has presented herself as “black, white, and American Indian/Alaskan Native,” but her estranged parents say she’s simply white and has been trying to deceive everyone. When the scandal attracted national attention, Dolezal resigned from her NAACP presidency — without saying anything about her race.

Examples of white people passing as black are much less common than the reverse, but there’s still historical precedent for what Dolezal did. Baz Dreisinger, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, traced the history of white passing in a 2008 book called Near Black. I talked to Dreisinger about how white passing has worked over time, and asked her whether there is ever a legitimate way to “cross-identify” with black culture.

Dara Lind: Can you give us a brief rundown of the history of white people passing as black in America?

Baz Dreisinger: It’s not like this was a massive chapter in American history, like traditional racial passing, which is a massive chapter. But I think people are shocked to discover that there is actually this history of white people who’ve passed as black and that Rachel Dolezal is hardly the first person to come along and do it, and in fact the way that she did it is in line with a number of historical examples.

In the context of slavery, there are both real and fictional accounts of white people who became enslaved — sometimes white people from the North who are kidnapped and sold into slavery as black. In a sense, passing for black becomes secondary to passing for slave. The idea is that the economic basis of this trumps the racial basis — not that they’re separate.

In that context, obviously, there was no change of appearance necessary. But in the 20th century, there’s a technology of passing that has to happen in order for the passing to be successful. Some people dyed their skin black and passed as black — the most famous example of that is John Howard Griffin, who wrote a memoir of his experience passing for a black man in the South during the era of Jim Crow. It’s called Black Like Me. He did it for a temporary experiment; he literally sat under the sun lamp and darkened his skin in order to do that. And there’s a woman who did a similar experiment to Griffin, whose name was Grace Halsell, who actually spent much of her life doing experimental passings — she passed as Native American, she passed as working-class — in order again to write exposés about what it’s like to be those things. So she wrote a memoir in the ’60s called Soul Sister, where she went through the same experiment Griffin did, only 10 years later, she’s in the North in Harlem as well as in the South, and her whole concept was, “I want to see what it’s like as a woman to do this.”

I think music is the most powerful place where we’ve seen this sort of passing happen, and also cultural appropriation — in many ways, my book is as much about cultural appropriation as it is about passing. You have a character like Eminem who’s clearly not passing, but is bringing up all these questions about cultural ownership and cross-racial identification — what does it mean to own a culture? Is there such a thing as owning a culture? Passing is a difficult thing to do today, given the legacies of cultural appropriation, of the metaphorical ripping off of black culture that we’ve seen — and, especially in music, appropriation where there’s literally not a credit being given and also not financial remuneration being given for cultural products that were inventions of nonwhite people…

Read the entire interview here.

Mimicry is Not Solidarity: Of Allies, Rachel Dolezal and the Creation of Antiracist White Identity

Tim Wise: Antiracist Essayist, Author and Educator
2015-06-14

Tim Wise

In a country where being black increases your likelihood of being unemployed, poor, rejected for a bank loan, suspected of wrongdoing and profiled as a criminal, being arrested or even shot by police, the mind boggles at the decision of Rachel Dolezal some years ago to begin posing as an African American woman. Yes perhaps blackness helps when you’re looking for a job in an Africana Studies department, selling your own African American portraiture art, or hoping to head up the local NAACP branch—all of which appear to have been the case for Dolezal—but generally speaking, adopting blackness as one’s personal identity and as a substitute for one’s actual whiteness is not exactly the path of least resistance in America.

And so, cognizant of the rarity with which white folks have tried to pass as black over the years—and in all likelihood for the above-mentioned reasons, among others—many have chimed in as to the personal, familial and even psychological issues that may lie at the heart of her deceptions. Not possessing a background in psychology I am loathe to spend too much time there, but having said that, it strikes me that there is an important, largely overlooked, and quite likely explanation for Dolezal’s duplicity, and one the importance of which goes well beyond her and whatever deep-seated emotional baggage may have contributed to her actions. Indeed, it has real implications for white people seeking to work in solidarity with people of color, whether in the BlackLivesMatter movement, Moral Mondays in North Carolina, or any other component of the modern civil rights and antiracism struggle. It is one I hadn’t really thought much about until I read something yesterday, a comment from one of her brothers (one of the actual black ones, adopted by her parents), to the effect that while Dolezal had been a graduate student at Howard, she felt as though she “hadn’t been treated very well,” at least in part because she was never fully accepted—she the white girl from Montana who paints black life onto canvas, and quite well at that—at this venerable and unapologetically black institution.

…Most disturbing of all, there was another path, however much Dolezal showed no interest in treading it. Whether intended or not, make no mistake, by negating the history (and even the apparent possibility) of real white antiracist solidarity, Dolezal ultimately provided a slap in the face to that history by saying that it wasn’t good enough for her to join…

Read the entire article here.

The 3 Biggest Issues Around Rachel Dolezal

Mixed in Canada
2015-06-15

Rema Tavares

Like many folks across North America, as soon as the Rachel Dolezal story broke, I was baffled. Here was yet another example of cultural appropriation of Blackness, which is quite commonplace (think Iggy Azalea, for example), but this story is a bit different. Usually the stories we hear of are people who identify as white, using Black cultural consumption for financial gain or access to what Rebecca Walker calls “Black cool”. However, this is the first story in a while where the person was outright living as Black for financial and social gain. Already on day three since the story broke, there are several excellent articles out there that outline the many ways in which Rachel’s behaviour is so problematic, so I will stick to what I think are the three biggest issues…

…Privilege

Everything that Rachel “did for Black people” she could have done as a white woman. White people who acknowledge and leverage their privilege exist. However, it is an incredible abuse of white privilege  to assume a Black identity, let alone to gain financially and socially from that decision. At any moment, Rachel could have chosen to wash off her fake tan and permed hair and live out the rest of her life as a white woman (again). On the other hand, no Black woman has that option unless she is racially ambiguous or white passing, which is a completely different situation. In that circumstance, passing for white stems from trying to access those very privileges that Rachel has had access to her entire life – including her time as a fake Black woman…

Read the entire article here.

Black Like Her

The New Yorker
2015-06-15

Jelani Cobb, Associate Professor of History
University of Connecticut

Rachel Dolezal is a white woman who has for some years identified as black. She wasn’t lying about who she is. She was lying about a lie.

On June 7th, Elinor Burkett published an Op-Ed in the Times expressing what she portrayed as a feminist’s reluctant skepticism about aspects of the transgender movement. She argued, in part, that the notion of men simply transitioning into women was equivalent to a white person darkening his or her skin and professing to be black. The example was meant as a reductio ad absurdum—but, less than a week later, Rachel Dolezal, the president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a professor of Africana studies, was unveiled as a white woman who has for some years presented herself and identified as black. On Monday, Dolezal resigned, in a statement that didn’t answer questions about what she referred to as “my personal identity,” though it did refer obliquely to “challenging the construct of race.” That answer is clearly inadequate; many people have challenged the construct of race without lying about their lives. But there is something more worth discussing here.

The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie…

…The spectrum of shades and colorings that constitute “black” identity in the United States, and the equal claim to black identity that someone who looks like White or Wright (or, for that matter, Dolezal) can have, is a direct product of bloodlines that attest to institutionalized rape during and after slavery. Nearly all of us who identify as African-American in this country, apart from some more recent immigrants, have at least some white ancestry. My own white great-grandparent is as inconsequential as the color of my palms in terms of my status as a black person in the United States. My grandparents had four children: my father and his brother, both almond-brown, with black hair and dark eyes, and two girls with reddish hair, fair skin, freckles, and gray eyes. All of them were equally black because they were equal heirs to the quirks of chance determining whether their ancestry from Europe or Africa was most apparent. Dolezal’s primary offense lies not in the silly proffering of a false biography but in knowing this ugly history and taking advantage of the reasons that she would, at least among black people, be taken at her word regarding her identity…

Read the entire article here.

Passing for black? Now that’s a twist

Cable News Network (CNN)
2015-06-12

Lisa Respers France, Senior producer, CNN Digital

(CNN)—”In this day and age who in the world willingly wants to be black?”

I jokingly said that to my husband when news about Rachel Dolezal broke.

Dolezal, 37, is president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP whose racial identity is being questioned, now that her parents have produced what they say is her birth certificate. It appears to show that she is white.

They said their daughter, who reportedly earned a master’s degree from the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., and is a professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University, began to “disguise herself” as black after the family adopted four African-American children.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a proud black woman who grew up in a family that is incredibly diverse and has such a heritage of hues that my parents were once questioned in a store as to where they “got that white baby from,” as they carted around my fair-skinned and light-eyed infant nephew.

But with all the heated debate over race relations and the treatment of minorities by law enforcement, which has resulted in unrest and more than a few black mothers burying their sons and daughters, I was both flabbergasted and intrigued by any claim that a white woman would willingly pass as black.

Race isn’t necessarily skin color

The concept of “passing” is something many African-Americans are familiar with. Some members of my own family were so light-skinned, with European features, that they willingly chose to live as white rather than deal with the discrimination of being black in America.

My mother, Patricia, who is fair and has greenish-gray eyes, tells the story of when her grandmother arrived at the bank where my mother worked after it closed. My biracial great-grandmother, Rose Evans, knocked on the window as my mother stood next to her white co-worker, counting out their drawer.

“There’s a woman trying to get your attention,” the co-worker told my mother.

When my mother responded “I know. That’s just my grandmother,” the co-worker continued: “No. There’s a white woman trying to get your attention.” “No. That’s my grandmother,” my mother repeated as her co-worker turned bright red with embarrassment.

The truth of the matter is that when it comes to race, you just can’t tell from looking…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal has a right to be black

Cable News Network (CNN)
2016-06-16

Camile Gear Rich, Professor of Law and Sociology
Gould School of Law
University of Southern California

(CNN)—When it comes to identity, America takes one step forward and two steps back.

On Monday, Rachel Dolezal, the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, resigned in shame because she had posed as a black woman even though she is biologically white.

The outing of Dolezal seems ironic given the recent public embrace of Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender woman formerly known as Bruce Jenner. Jenner seems to have ushered in an era of greater tolerance about the constructed nature of identity. After all, when a transgender woman is elevated to the cover of Vanity Fair, it’s as though we have reached a tipping point. We can accept the idea that one’s social identity can be radically transformed if it doesn’t match with what one feels in the heart…

…In my view, hate the sin but love the sinner. Dolezal lied. She should not have lied, but she lied for reasons with which we can sympathize.

I admire the way she chose to live her life as a black person. Advocating for anti-racism efforts is ethical and admirable if she wanted to claim blackness as a social identity. Those quick to throw stones well know that there are costs to living life as a black person, and once Dolezal made the switch she seems never to have looked back. I will not indict her for her choice to link herself to this community, and I would consider her claim no greater if she identified a long lost African ancestor…

Read the entire article here.

The “one-drop rule,” which, for much of American history, legally defined as black anyone with a black ancestor, was used to keep black people from adopting whiteness. Ironically, it has made it easier for Ms. [Rachel] Dolezal to claim blackness without others questioning the assertion. If they are not themselves of a similar hue to Ms. Dolezal, many black people watching her story unfold can recognize in her features a cousin, parent or grandparent. African-Americans vary in appearance from light-skinned to coal black, straight- to curly-haired, keen- to broad-featured, and every possible combination in between.

Tamara Winfrey Harris, “Rachel Dolezal’s Harmful Masquerade,” The New York Times, June 16, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/opinion/rachel-dolezals-harmful-masquerade.html.