{"id":41417,"date":"2015-06-16T02:08:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-16T02:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41417"},"modified":"2017-10-07T20:51:26","modified_gmt":"2017-10-07T20:51:26","slug":"white-womanhood-revised","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41417","title":{"rendered":"White Womanhood Revised"},"content":{"rendered":"

White Womanhood Revised<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Avidly: A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel<\/a>
\n2015-06-15<\/p>\n

Brigitte Fielder<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
\nUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Whatever else we might say about it, let\u2019s not forget this: Rachel Dolezal\u2019s<\/a> story is a decidedly American one. Here, I refer not only to story of Dolezal\u2019s racial passing<\/a>, but also to how Dolezal\u2019s story triggers and reveals America\u2019s racial fascinations. Whatever Dolezal\u2019s motives or ethics, our scrutiny of Dolezal\u2019s race echoes a long history of parsing race in the United States more generally.<\/p>\n

Much of the conversation about Dolezal proceeds within long-standing US assumptions about how race \u201cworks\u201d: if her biological parents are \u201creally\u201d white people, then so is she, and therefore she cannot be black. While Dolezal is a member of an interracial family, she seems to have no mixed-race African American genealogy, and this is the single deciding factor about her own race. In effect, these assumptions tell us that there is no way for a woman who was born white (i.e., to white parents) to become black. For her to claim blackness, then, is a conscious act of deception.<\/p>\n

But for all the clarity these assumptions provide, they are not the only American story about race and womanhood. Even as Americans want race to be simple and essentialist, American racial ideologies rarely allows it to be. Race, Dolezal\u2019s story reminds us, is connected to the history of racial justice work and interracial collaboration, and complicated by relations of power and privilege. Her story also reminds us how race is connected to not only biological relationships, but also to social relationships. For a scholar of race and nineteenth-century literature like myself, Dolezal\u2019s complex (and confusing) story calls to mind other stories of white womanhood revised.<\/p>\n

Consider how Dolezal\u2019s American Story aligns with this fictional one: Kate Chopin\u2019s<\/a> 1893 short story, \u201cD\u00e9sir\u00e9e\u2019s Baby<\/a>.\u201d In the story, D\u00e9sir\u00e9e, a woman of unknown parentage, is adopted into a respectable white family and marries the wealthy son of slaveholders, Armand Aubigny. When D\u00e9sir\u00e9e and Armand\u2019\u2019s baby begins to show signs of being mixed-race, Armand argues that, because the baby does not look white, it is not white. The appearance of D\u00e9sir\u00e9e\u2019s baby calls D\u00e9sir\u00e9e\u2019s race into question…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whatever else we might say about it, let\u2019s not forget this: Rachel Dolezal\u2019s story is a decidedly American one. Here, I refer not only to story of Dolezal\u2019s racial passing, but also to how Dolezal\u2019s story triggers and reveals America\u2019s racial fascinations. Whatever Dolezal\u2019s motives or ethics, our scrutiny of Dolezal\u2019s race echoes a long history of parsing race in the United States more generally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[20249,20248,19964,19963,19962,483,20241],"class_list":["post-41417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-avidly","tag-avidly-a-los-angeles-review-of-books-channel","tag-brigitte-fielder","tag-brigitte-n-fielder","tag-brigitte-nicole-fielder","tag-kate-chopin","tag-rachel-dolezal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41417"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55012,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41417\/revisions\/55012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}