Tag: Rachel A. Dolezal

  • Dolezal and the Defense of the Community Public Seminar 2015-07-09 Richard Kaplan Reflections on the unique difficulties of passing from white to black in America It strikes me that an incredible amount of media attention and denunciation has focused on a poor, perhaps deluded woman in Spokane, Washington. Rachel Dolezal’s crime was to lie and…

  • Historian Allyson Hobbs on the History of Racial Passing The 7th Avenue Project: Thinking Persons’ Radio 2015-06-28 Robert Pollie, Host, Creator and Producer The recent case of Rachel Dolezal – the “black” activist outed as white – may have seemed novel, but she’s actually part of an old tradition of racial passing in this country.…

  • From ‘blood quantum’ to multiracial bill of rights, Dolezal saga ignites talk of identity The Seattle Times 2015-06-17 Nina Shapiro, Seattle Times staff reporter The endless fascination with the Rachel Dolezal story reveals our hunger to talk about racial identity in all its complexity. When Amanda Erekson was in her early 20s, a friend introduced…

  • The weird, strange narrative of Rachel Dolezal The Remix WHYY-FM Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2015-06-17 James Peterson, Host What determines your race? Is it about genetics or cultural identification? The curious case of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who has been passing for black, has been met with surprise, outrage and confusion. Dolezal, former president of the Spokane…

  • Dolezal, Jenner raise fundamental questions about identity The Boston Globe 2015-06-16 Farrah Stockman, Globe Staff Finally, Rachel Dolezal — the self-identified black daughter of two Caucasian parents — has spoken. And finally, she was asked a question I’ve been wondering for days: When did it start? “At a very young age,” she replied. “About 5…

  • The ambiguity of racial categories The Washington Post 2015-06-16 Andrew Gelman, Professor of Statistics and Political Science Columbia University, New York, New York Racial classification has been in the news lately with the story of Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP official who is ethnically white but characterized herself as black until the story came out: The…

  • What Is Whiteness? Sunday Review The New York Times 2015-06-20 Nell Irvin Painter, Professor Emerita of History Princeton University The terrorist attack in Charleston, S.C., an atrocity like so many other shameful episodes in American history, has overshadowed the drama of Rachel A. Dolezal’s yearslong passing for black. And for good reason: Hateful mass murder…

  • The fiction of race hides the real source of racism and inequity in America today.

  • Driven by Love or Ambition, Slipping Across the Color Line Through the Ages The New York Times 2015-06-28 Rachel L. Swarns Clarence King, a Yale-educated white man who worked as a geologist in the 1800s and dined at the White House, lived a secret life as James Todd, a black train porter with a wife…

  • My father is black. My mother is white. I self-identify as black and as mixed and I don’t relate to those as mutually exclusive. I also try to be mindful and try to have a certain humility about how my experience differs from most other black people; about how I have certain types of residual white privilege which…