Rachel Dolezal’s adopted black brother said: “It all started with the hair.”
If she weren’t in the news for being black but really white, I would say that “starting with the hair” would most definitely make the recently resigned president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP a black woman.
Because everything begins and ends with hair for black women.
Dolezal has been living a long and intricate lie that even she — as elusive, sometimes silent/sometimes absent and obtuse as she has been with the media — knew was someday going to be uncovered.
Dolezal’s white biological parents have come forth to blast her lies about her race; her two adopted black brothers have also come forward to say she admonished them not to “blow her cover” and to please keep their yaps shut.
This is such a strange, wonderful, postmodern and important story to watch unfold, particularly in the waning months of President Obama’s presidency.
It is a perfect bookend to all that early-era talk around Obama about post-racism and the “end of blackness” that earned certain ignorant scholars book contracts after they predicted that electing the first-ever black-identified president would signal the end of blackness and tamp down the national conversation about racism.
Well, an endless cycle of stories about subversively racist politicians undermining the president’s authority and publicly disrespecting him, coupled with a spate of deadly police shootings of unarmed black men, sure took care of that.
But Dolezal’s story will surely go down in the annals as an example of white appropriation of epic proportions. Forget Eminem, the white Blues and all those black-loving Kardashian sisters.
Dolezal’s kinking up her hair and mysteriously darkening her skin — is it makeup? self tan? tanning bed? — is the ultimate and last great example of brazen appropriation; I’d dare even call it modern blackface or even minstrelsy in the name of so-called social justice.
Dolezal is also America’s best and most thorough whigger. She could teach Chet Hanks — Tom Hanks’ poseur/rapper son — a thing or two about whiggerdom because where Hanks is itching to be told it is OK to publicly be a white boy with enough carte blanche or a valid enough ’hood pass to call his black friends nigger, Dolezal became one and infiltrated the slave cabins on every level — professional, personal and social.
She told Matt Lauer Tuesday morning on The Today Show that she began her “identity” as a black girl at about the age of 5. This, despite the fact that she was blonde, blue-eyed, Nordic-looking and growing up in a privileged family in Montana.
Media watchers have speculated that perhaps because Dolezal’s parents adopted two black children, maybe this intimate exposure to blackness influenced Dolezal’s decision to “become black.”
This does not hold water for me.
Anyone who has even remotely seen white adoptive parents with black children knows that those white parents usually and often struggle to properly translate and offer up an authentic black cultural experience for their black charges and that black kids who grow up immersed in white environments usually emerge looking for blackness — whatever that means — when they leave their white parents’ home. Or, they live their adult lives unapologetic to the judgments, observations and criticism of (black) folks who think they didn’t get enough of their black selves growing up.
I used to be one of those judgmental Negroes at the sight of white parents with black children; now I am old enough to appreciate the fact that someone — anyone — is giving a black child a safe and loving environment to launch from.
Dolezal might have, however, felt a close kinship with blackness by growing up in a house with black people, but I think she has a long-festering personality disorder, at the least.
At the most, she is wily and shape shifting according to what will and can advance her life’s goals.
When she was studying at historically black Howard University, she sued the school for discriminating against her because she was white.
A-ha!
When Lauer pressed her on this — on using the convenience of race when it suited her — she prattled on about being “pregnant and white” and losing a teaching assistant’s job to a black candidate.
This is probably when her ruse solidified and she knew she could get farther in life as an ad hoc member of a more precious minority.
A lot more is expected of, and therefore denied, white women as a protected class in America; it’s assumed they can rebound, marry up or use their feminine wiles to cut a swath to where they’re going.
They will get there.
However, black women in America are still fetishized, and therefore coddled just enough that they’re — ahem, excuse me, we’re — given some opportunities to speak and tell our stories in ways black men still are not. But it all evens out, because public concern and the public gaze remain fixed on the plight of the black male in America as though this were the 1960s.
Where black women may benefit more from set-aside programs and promotions, black men are the lifetime beneficiaries of care and feeding — a much more enviable position.
So, Dolezal has known all along what she was doing.
And she would be lying if she said her move to be black was not the fiercest privilege play ever.
Who else but a white woman could wake up one day, decide she wants to be another something or someone else and set about being that thing, then enjoying all the side benefits of that grand lie, but a white woman?
This entire debacle is a win-win for Dolezal.
Now she’s been found not to be black, she still gets the blue ribbon of returning to whiteness — that most coveted American trophy.
One last little thing: The bleeding hearts who are trying to equate what Dolezal has done with what Bruce Jenner did to become a woman should cease and desist that idiocy right now.
Race and sexuality are not and never will be the same thing, and they cannot ever share the same martyred space, try as queers and queer supporters might to make the two the same in their pitch for us all to go easy on Dolezal.
The two are mutually exclusive, although they may walk together beneath the same human-rights umbrella.
But try convincing a black person about gender rights who helped change American civil rights law by getting her head knocked in and she’ll tell you it’s easier for Rachel Dolezal to pass as black than it is for LGBTQ folks to align themselves rightly with racial justice.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2015.