{"id":41462,"date":"2015-06-17T21:12:58","date_gmt":"2015-06-17T21:12:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41462"},"modified":"2017-03-29T14:38:25","modified_gmt":"2017-03-29T14:38:25","slug":"mimicry-is-not-solidarity-of-allies-rachel-dolezal-and-the-creation-of-antiracist-white-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41462","title":{"rendered":"Mimicry is Not Solidarity: Of Allies, Rachel Dolezal and the Creation of Antiracist White Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mimicry is Not Solidarity: Of Allies, Rachel Dolezal and the Creation of Antiracist White Identity<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Tim Wise: Antiracist Essayist, Author and Educator<\/a>
\n2015-06-14<\/p>\n

Tim Wise<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a> some years ago to begin posing as an African American woman<\/a>. Yes perhaps blackness helps when you\u2019re looking for a job in an Africana Studies<\/a> department, selling your own African American portraiture art, or hoping to head up the local NAACP<\/a> branch\u2014all of which appear to have been the case for Dolezal\u2014but generally speaking, adopting blackness as one\u2019s personal identity and as a substitute for one\u2019s actual whiteness is not exactly the path of least resistance in America.<\/p>\n

And so, cognizant of the rarity with which white folks have tried to pass as black<\/a> over the years\u2014and in all likelihood for the above-mentioned reasons, among others\u2014many 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\u2019s 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<\/a> movement, Moral Mondays<\/a> in North Carolina<\/a>, or any other component of the modern civil rights and antiracism struggle. It is one I hadn\u2019t 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 \u201chadn\u2019t been treated very well,\u201d at least in part because she was never fully accepted\u2014she the white girl from Montana<\/a> who paints black life onto canvas, and quite well at that\u2014at this venerable and unapologetically black institution.<\/p>\n

…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\u2019t good enough for her to join…<\/p>\n

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

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\u2019re 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\u2014all of which appear to have been the case for Dolezal\u2014but generally speaking, adopting blackness as one\u2019s personal identity and as a substitute for one\u2019s actual whiteness is not exactly the path of least resistance in America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,6462,26,394,20],"tags":[899,20241,7870],"class_list":["post-41462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-naacp","tag-rachel-dolezal","tag-tim-wise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41462","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=41462"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53050,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41462\/revisions\/53050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}