Your Basic Rachel Dolezal Questions Answered

William E. Artis, Untitled
(Idealized Head of a Woman).
(Photo by Jerry Dohnal. Original here.)

So, is Rachel Dolezal transracial or not?

First of all, please stop using the word “transracial” when talking about Rachel Dolezal, because it doesn’t mean what you think it means. Transracial already exists, but to describe children, usually of color, adopted into a family of a different race, usually white. These children are transplanted from the race, culture, and heritage of their birth into a completely different one, but that doesn’t mean they somehow stop being African-American, Ethiopian, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Salvadoran. 

In fact, the true meaning of transracial reveals the impossibility of Dolezal’s claim to racial transformation. Many transracial adoptees experience, in essence, a white childhood, surrounded by white family in a white neighborhood and growing up in white schools. Yet they still carry their “otherness” with them at all times—their skin, their eyes, their hair. They grow up moving through the world as people of color, and the people around them will still interact with them as such, no matter how “white” their upbringing.

Dolezal passed for black for a number of years, but she cannot undo her past. She was born into a white family, grew up as a white child, attended Howard University as a white woman. She can’t erase—or re-race—all those years that she experienced the world as a white girl and woman. 

Additionally, a lot of black folks would (and do) argue that her appropriation of the black experience is one of the whitest things about her. 

Well, some black people have passed as white and severed ties with their black families. Isn’t that the same thing? 

The short answer is: No, because privilege. 

We know for a fact that race is a social construction, not a biological division. In 1972, a Harvard geneticist published a paper showing that the majority of genetic variation appeared within “races” rather than between them. That is, most genetic variation happens at the individual level, not at the level of groups. 

But race still matters, because as a social construction, it has ordered social and economic hierarchies that consistently place whiteness at the top and blackness at the bottom. Race has been deployed for centuries to enforce social divisions to justify the exploitation of those considered “lesser” for the benefit of those considered “greater.” Whether we are talking about Africans cutting sugarcane to enrich plantation owners, or Chinese laying down track to enrich railway barons, or Italians working assembly lines to enrich industrial bosses, the dynamic (if not the scale) is the same. (Irish, Italians, Filipinos, South Asians, and many other nationalities have been labeled “black” at different points in history, although that has not changed the fact that people of African origins have always been consigned the bottom of the racial hierarchy.)

When someone of a “lesser” race with light skin, “good” hair, and “fine” features has taken the leap to pass as white, it has been to access privileges that would be difficult, if not impossible, to attain with a non-white identity. Moreover, passing in this case carries the risk of discovery and, along with it, blackmail, beating, rape, or death.

Dolezal did not simply reverse the path of passing. That would mean that she gave up privileges to live in a “lesser” position. 

On the contrary, Dolezal’s passing allowed her to take positions of leadership and authority, as a professor of Africana Studies and the president of the Spokane NAACP. She ended up gaining privileges by passing—just as African Americans who crossed over to whiteness have—and she took scant privileges from a community that has few privileges to offer. 

This doesn’t reverse or challenge the existing power structures, it reproduces them. 

Doesn’t all the work Dolezal did for the African-American community justify her passing? 

I’m not sure anyone is up for trying to quantify the “good” that Dolezal accomplished for African Americans and balance it against the fact that she took paying jobs that most likely would have gone to honest-to-goodness black women. With one hand she (presumably) gaveth, but with the other she tooketh away from people she ostensibly wanted to “help.”

(The revelation that she filed suit against Howard University for discriminating against her as a white woman, claiming that Howard was “permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult” pretty much undercuts the “good work” defense of Dolezal.) 

Furthermore, if the work was truly important to her, she easily could have done it as a white woman. White professors of Africana Studies exist. White members of the NAACP exist. Dolezal didn’t need to pass to help African Americans. 

Arguably, Dolezal could have been more effective as a white ally. What’s galling to African American communities and to white allies is that, by disguising herself as black, Dolezal took an easy path to black activism. White allies must unlearn racism. They must sit back and listen to voices of color. They must play supporting roles while people of color take center stage. They must prove, constantly, that they are down for the struggle. It’s hard work, and it’s emotionally challenging. But Dolezal decided to take a short cut. By making herself black, she no longer had to provide ally bona fides. 

She basically did what every anti-Affirmative Action right-winger fears that real people of color do: She played a [fake] race card to jump ahead. 

How can we celebrate Caitlyn Jenner yet condemn Rachel Dolezal? Both of them changed a socially constructed identity—gender and race respectively. Isn’t that hypocritical? 

Please reflect with me for a moment about the children we have seen in recent years who have come out as transgender, John Jolie-Pitt being the most famous. 

Many transgender children begin to form—or, at least, verbalize—their gender identities as toddlers or young children, long before they have a full understanding of how gender identity is constructed. 

Moreover, trans* kids either struggle with conforming to their assigned gender under pressure to be “normal,” or they express their true gender identities in the face of intense societal condemnation. Trans* children and adults face bullying, violence, and even death in order to simply be their true selves in the world. 

Dolezal was an adult before she began to talk about her supposed identification with African Americans, long after she learned how racial identities are assigned and constructed, and with full knowledge of how disguising her race would allow her to move more freely within black spaces. After “changing” (i.e., hiding and lying about) her race, she then went on to exploit her new “identity,” earning both money and cultural capital from her racial masking. 

Although “becoming black” (if such a thing were possible) could certainly come with severe consequences, as a “light-skinned African American,” Dolezal retained color privilege, and it’s unclear whether she has suffered at all from her switch to “blackness.” Even the racist hate mail she claims to have received may have been fabricated. 

And as I said above, Dolezal’s move across the color line was a dodge to avoid the hard work of being a white ally. 

People who are trans* struggle to live as their authentic selves. They are brave. 

Dolezal cheated the system for her personal gain. She is a coward. 

In addition, she will probably make a mint off her book contract/film rights. 

(Update: Dolezal asserted that she “felt a spiritual, visceral, instinctual connection with...the black experience” “from a very young age.” I say, You don’t get to sue Howard from the position of a white woman, then turn around and claim that you have “felt black” since kindergarten. You don’t get to take whatever positionality suits you, or works best for you at the time. Moreover, the luxury of passing is exactly that: a luxury. Most of us in brown and black bodies don’t have it and never will.)

What about that hair? How did she do it?

I hope that some African American journo, somewhere, is trying to find Dolezal’s hairdresser. Right now, the main guess is wigs ‘n’ weaves. In her gobsmacking interview in the college newspaper, The Easterner, Dolezal claims that she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2006, and she turned her long blonde dreadlocks into a wig. This is also the year she started to claim an African American racial identity, which seems awfully convenient. (Update: It’s a weave.)

What important news is this Rachel Dolezal mess distracting me from? 

The Dominican Republic is at it again, poised to deport hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian heritage. A white cop holding down a black girl in a bikini is just one facet of how state power oppresses women and girls. Migrants continue to pour into Europe via Italy from Libya, and if the EU cannot come to an agreement with Italy, Italy is threatening to stop receiving the refugees, which could bring the death toll from the dangerous crossing back up.

Further reading (H/T to Kiese Laymon, whose Facebook posts are also very much on point; Sasha Harris-Cronin; and Jason Sperber):

Lisa Marie Rollins, Transracial Lives Matter: Rachel Dolezal and the Privilege of Racial Manipulation

Rebecca Carroll, I Am Black. Rachel Dolezal Is Not.

Awesomely Luvvie, About Rachel Dolezal the Undercover Sista and Performing Blackness

Tiq Milan, White Women Taking Up Space. Theoretical or Otherwise.

Ali Michael, Rachel Dolezal Syndrome

Adam Serwer, Why Rachel Dolezal Needed to Construct Her Own Black Narrative

Kat Blaque, Why Rachel Dolezal’s Fake “Transracial” Identity Is Nothing Like Being Transgender—Take It From a Black Trans Woman Who Knows (I take issue with the way Blaque tries to distinguish race from gender, but the rest of the video is right on.

Lisa, How Rachel Dolezal Just Made Things Harder for Those of Us Who Don’t “Look Black”

A good summary of the scientific non-existence of race and the real social construction of it: American Scientist, “Race Finished,” a book review by Jan Sapp

A basic case study of African Americans passing: “A Chosen Exile: Black People Passing in White America.” (From NPR’s Code Switch) 

I can’t vouch for all the facts in this article, but it does include a decent summary of the phenomenon of evangelical transracial adoption, which could place the Dolezal household into context: Rachel Dolezal’s Creationist Parents. (From Reverb Press)

Rest in (People) Power, Nelson Mandela

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Madiba went home today.

The lesson of Mandela and the Anti-Apartheid movement is not about endings. I remember how elated and triumphant I felt in 1994, when South Africans of all colors went to the polls. But the path to liberation does not end with democracy. Democracy is but one step. We are still treading the path. 

That path started before Nelson Mandela, and it continues after him. No one person is a movement. Great shifts in history come from masses of people working together: drops of water that make a flood. 

After a liberator dies, power rewrites the story. So it’s up to the people to remember the truth. Human lives are never simple, nothing is just black-and-white. (Not even South Africa—the Anti-Apartheid movement included every constituency of the Rainbow Nation, including people of Southeast Asian and South Asian origins.) The South African constitution enshrined GLBT rights because people in the movement did not hide for the sake of the struggle, they instead made connections between racism and homophobia visible and visceral. The Anti-Apartheid movement aimed for nothing less than liberation for all, but only because people within the movement demanded it. 

Power sees liberation movements as the enemy. Power wants nothing more than Stasis, to continue itself into perpetuity. People want Change, because we are alive, because we grow and die, because we have children, because Life begins and ends and keeps going on, but never the same. 

Mandela gave us a gift. He gave us tools. We don’t need to mourn what we’ve lost. Let’s instead revel in the gifts we have received, in the knowledge we have gained. Power wants us to forget. We will not forget. For Madiba’s sake, and for all those ordinary, mundane freedom fighters whose names are forgotten to history, but not to their friends and families, we must remember. We have to take up the tools, well-worn. We repair and use them again. And we pass them on. 

******** 

Since the day of Mandela’s passing, I have heard from friends who are teachers that many of their students—elementary to high school—do not know who Mandela was nor what he accomplished. 

Zoë Wicomb wrote in The New Yorker, “Every schoolchild knows of his contribution to democracy in South Africa, of the sacrifices he made, of his status as an icon of reconciliation.” 

Apparently not. And they won’t unless we tell them.  


Readings on Mandela the man, not Mandela the myth:

"The Meaning of Mandela," The Nation 
"Don't Sanitize Mandela,"  The Daily Beast
"Three Myths About Mandela Worth Busting," Africa Is A Country
"That Time Reagan Vetoed the Anti-Apartheid Act," Colorlines.

Multicultural Kid Blogs has a tribute page to Mandela, including a link to an elementary school lesson plan about Mandela.

My Daughter the White Girl, Part 3

"A rainbow would be boring/if it were only green or blue/
What makes a rainbow beautiful/is that it has every hue/
So aren't you glad you look like you?"
From We're Different, We're the Same.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

(Continued from Part 1 and Part 2)

At first, I followed the red herring that the word “pretty” represented. I told her, “I know all the princesses you see have light skin and yellow hair, but that’s not the only kind of beauty. There’s lots of different ways to be pretty.” She said, earnestly, “But some of the princesses have brown hair, like me.” She nodded for emphasis. I realized I’d gone down the wrong path in the conversation.

Silver was telling me that people’s value hinged entirely on their “prettiness,” a value inculcated in her by books, videos, and toys, most of them by Disney, and most of them outside my house—at her day care, at friends’ houses, at the doctor’s office. Girls also cannot escape the peer-pressure of “prettiness.” It doesn’t help when adults reinforce this value by constantly commenting on little girls’ outfits and looks. (Latina Fatale made me notice my complicity in this.)

I found myself facing two fronts instead of one. Now, it was not just the question of working against cultural messages of race, but also gender.

It was actually Po Bronson himself during a live chat about NurtureShock who gave me the word I should have used in the first place: wrong. “People with light skin didn’t want people with dark skin to go to the same schools or eat in the same restaurants or live in the same neighborhoods because they thought they weren’t as good or pretty or smart as people with light skin, but that was wrong. And people with all different colors of skin, they fought long and hard to change that. They said, ‘No, that’s not fair.’ And they got hurt because of it. Other people hurt their bodies. But they did it anyway because it was the right thing to do.

“And Silver, it doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside. Whether you’re pretty or not, it’s not as important as being a good person. People stood up for what was right, for what was fair, and that is the most important thing.” I could feel pressure building up inside, the urgency to pass it on. Miraculously, she was quiet, her eyes fixed on me.

I said, “You know, if they hadn’t stood up for what was right, then Grandma wouldn’t have been able to marry Mezhaidig, because Grandma’s skin is brown and Mezhaidig’s skin is light, and I wouldn’t have been born.”

Then her eyes lit up. “And you wouldn’t have been able to marry Daddy, because his skin is light and yours is brown!” “That’s right!” I said. The pressure eased. Daddy was ready. I helped Silver put on her shoes, hugged her tightly, kissed her, and said, “I love you, baby.” “I love you, too, Mama,” she said, and walked out the door.

No bunny's really color blind/Maybe it's a fact/We all should face/
Every bunny makes judgments/Based on race.—
with apologies to Avenue Q.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I have to keep reminding myself that I can’t overcome racism and sexism in a day, not even with my own children. It’s a process. Just as absorbing racism and sexism is something she has learned little by little, every day. I have to remain vigilant and pounce on the moments when I can change her perspective and reveal the prejudice for the injustice it is.

But I can’t help but feel a little sadness and distance. For her, these discussions will continue to be abstract. She is protected by the privilege that her skin color provides her. For me, racism is something that I will always take personally, as an attack on my very being.

It’s funny how we can wish for our children to have it easier than we did. And yet, when it comes, success is bittersweet. We pass on our wisdom, but will they really know it if they don’t live it? The only president Silver has known is Barack Obama. While I grew up at a time when being biracial was so unusual as to be almost freakish, she is growing up at a time and in a place where being biracial is almost the norm. I have to console myself with the knowledge that, in our microcosm at least, this is progress.

My Daughter the White Girl, Part 2

Silver and Ocho's dolls. (Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

(Continued from Part 1)

There’s nothing quite like having spent your life being mad at racism, learning about its insidious effects, living on both sides of the equation in the United States and in West Africa, and having your precious child say something racist. It sent me into a full panic. How could this happen? 
 
Ever since I had read NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, I had made it a point to talk openly with Silver about skin color and body difference. In the chapter entitled “White Parents Don’t Talk About Race,” the authors trace a variety of studies to build a case that not talking about race explicitly with children results in kids forming their own biases in favor of their own race. White parents in particular felt uncomfortable talking about race with their children. They relied on vague statements such as “everyone is equal” to convey a message of colorblind equality. One of the researchers, Brigitte Vittrup, summed up the problem when she said, “A lot of parents... admitted they just didn’t know what to say to their kids, and they didn’t want the wrong thing coming out of the mouth of their kids.” 
 
These parents assume that children are born colorblind and that if they don’t practice prejudice in their own household, the children won’t pick it up. For them, drawing attention to racial difference is tantamount to opening the door to racism. Bronson and Merryman argue that children already notice racial difference, and that by not talking about it, parents convey the message that only people like themselves are OK, and they imply that racial Others are somehow less nice, trustworthy, friendly, etc. as whites are.
 
I had my own experience with a child “naturally” noticing—and fearing—difference. When I lived in Senegal, my youngest “sister,” less than a year old, would cry the moment she saw me. Even in a cosmopolitan city like Dakar, she saw few foreigners in her neighborhood, much less in her house. It took a week of seeing me every day before she warmed up to me. This story, of African babies crying at the sight of a “white” person, I heard repeated often amongst Peace Corps volunteers and expats. Similarly, when Silver was an infant, my Congolese ex-boyfriend came to Los Angeles with his Senegalese wife and their dance company. We spent an afternoon and an evening catching up. Silver, not a very trusting baby to begin with, wanted nothing to do with them. 
 
Bronson and Merryman only touch on the role that cultural and social messages play in forming racist attitudes outside of parental influence: “Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth, and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence.” They don’t speculate, however, on how early these messages in the cultural environment begin to saturate a child’s mind with information on racial hierarchies. 
 
It was easy to know when Silver began to notice gender differences. Her favorite colors seemed to change overnight from turquoise blue and red to pink. She would say things like, “Boys don’t have long hair” or “No, Mama! Not those pants! Those are boy pants! I want girl pants!” I blamed the older girls at day care. 
 
And yet it seems that kids rarely come out with overt signs of noticing racial difference by themselves. Certainly, Silver didn’t talk about it until I started to. But if African babies cry at the sight of a “white” foreigner, and my “white” daughter cried at the sight of two Africans, perhaps attitudes towards racial difference form so early, in a pre-verbal stage, that our only choice is to undo early racial bias.
 
Armed with the evidence from NurtureShock, I diligently acquired all the right books: We’re Different, We’re the Same; Shades of People; All the Colors of the Earth; Whoever You Are. We talked about the people we knew and what colors their skins were. We talked about how we have different skin colors within our own family, how Grandma’s skin is darker than Mama’s skin, and my skin is darker than Silver’s. 
 
Silver has, and had, plenty of African-American teachers. For a while, her favorite teacher was a woman of Xhosa heritage—not just Black, but Africa Black. What we don’t have here are friends (e.g., people who have come over for dinner or had us over for dinner) who are African-American with dark-brown skin. Most of my African-American friends are on the East Coast, and the few I had here finished graduate school and scattered to take up jobs in Chicago, New York, Boston, Ohio, etc. Since I became a parent, I haven’t met many other African-American parents because I live on the Westside in Los Angeles. We have white people, Asians, and Latinos in abundance. Black people? Not so much. Many of the African Americans I know are mixed—I swear, we halfies/hapas/metis/mestizos must be the majority here—and so come in a range of shades, few of them dark.
 
So when my daughter told me, “I don’t like people with dark brown skin,” I knew I had to seize the moment to undo my terrible mistake. I said the two words that opened the door: “Why not?”
 
And that’s when she said, “I don’t like them because they aren’t pretty.”
 
I started cursing Disney in the foulest terms I could come up with. Silently, of course. 

(To be continued in Part 3.) 

My Daughter the White Girl

Photo by Kevin Miller

“I don’t like people with dark brown skin.” 

This is so hard to write. I mean, who wants to start a conversation that goes, “My five-year-old daughter is racist”? But this is how deep it goes in our culture. My daughter doesn’t know how to read, but she has read the signs that tell her: Black people are marginal Others. 

Of course, this conversation started right before she had to leave for preschool. She had been dressed, brushed, fed, and sunscreened. My husband’s coffee sat ready on the counter. Any moment now, he would emerge from the bathroom with clean teeth, and they would have to put on their shoes and go. 

Moments before, her little brother, Ocho*, and I were reading Bear on a Bike, and Silver* came to sit with us. When we read books now, the kids point to characters in the book and say, “This is me. This is you. This is Mama. This is Daddy.” So Ocho pointed to a girl with dark brown skin and a star-shaped thatch of curly hair and said, “This is Silver.” She immediately protested. “NOOOOOOO! I don’t want to be her!” 

I could ignore where this was going. I knew this moment could mean the difference between my husband getting to work on time... or not. 

But then again, I couldn’t ignore where it was going. Not when I had grown up feeling acutely conscious of being the only brown girl in my class. Not when I had struggled with seeing only white girls around me at school, on television, in print, and no reflections of me or my family. 

And not when I had learned the names of Martin Luther King, Jr., El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Rosa Parks, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and on and on to those whose names I don’t know, but whose courage not only changed my world, but made my life possible. Those who marched in the streets, faced savage dogs, fire hoses, fists, clubs, and bullets. 

In moments like these, I am overwhelmed by what I know and what she doesn’t yet. Yuri Kochiyama. Cesar Chavez. Leonard Peltier. Audre Lorde. More names than I can possibly list. Loving v. Virginia. The Bluest Eye. This Bridge Called My Back. Social movement upon social movement. A lifetime of history, literature, political analysis, and lived experience of discrimination in America. Enough examples to fill a library of books on how ugly and twisted human nature can get, and the myriad ways that we, the marginalized, have fought back. 

And here my daughter sits next to me: to the eye, a white girl. California tan skin, brown hair with sunny highlights. Round, brown eyes. Wherever she goes, adults coo over her, call her “princess,” and tell her how cute and adorable she is. 

People mistake me for a nanny. Children look at her, look at me, and say, “You’re her mommy?” 

Between what I know already and what she will learn is a gaping maw of meanness and hate that I am not willing to teach her about yet. Like any mother, I would like to spare her the fear, shame, loneliness, and self-hatred I grew up with. Mean, to her, is when a kid in her school calls her “poopy,” or when she wants to watch a video and I won’t let her.

My previous attempt to explain discrimination to her completely backfired. We were listening to Sweet Honey in the Rock’s All for Freedom. (I mean, how much more racial could I get? There’s even a version of Kumbaya on it—“Cum Bah Ya”—with African-style polyrhythms.) Her favorite track at the time was “Calypso Freedom,” which she called “Freedom is coming and it won’t be long.” “Mama, what does it mean?” she asked. 

So I tried to explain segregation. I used much of the same language that Sweet Honey uses on the CD. I said that kids with dark brown skin weren’t allowed to go to the same schools as kids with light-colored skin. I tried to explain anti-miscegenation laws, red-lining, and Jim Crow in four-year-old terms. I asked her if she understood. She said yes, and added, “Mama, I don’t want to talk about this any more.” Which is how I knew I’d overwhelmed her and that she didn’t get it. 

But I didn’t realize how badly I had done my job until months later when Silver said she didn’t like people with dark brown skin that she didn’t know. “Why, honey?” I asked. She answered, “Remember how you told me that people with dark brown skin aren’t trained the way that people with light skin are?” 

Oh shit. 

(To be continued in Part 2.) 

*Not their real names. I'm not that L.A.!