The strange case of a white civil rights activist, who went to great lengths to pass herself off as African-American for more than 10 years, has elicited a storm of conflicting opinion.
Professor in Africana Studies, Rachel Dolezal, currently the president of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), got away with the lie until her estranged parents blew her cover with photographs of their fair-skinned, blonde-haired daughter taken during her teenage years, her birth certificate and a detailed breakdown of her European ancestry.
The 37-year-old not only drastically changed her appearance — darkening her skin with makeup, coloring her hair that she sported as dreadlocks or in Afro-style — she also claimed that her adopted brother was her son, produced a black “father” for the cameras and went on a paid talk circuit telling audiences how she had been racially abused in her youth.
As unusual as this tale is, what’s interesting is the diversity of reactions Dolezal’s outing has received. The NAACP has issued a statement saying it stands behind Dolezal’s advocacy record and encourages “Americans of all stripes to become members and serve as leaders in our organization.” Actress and singer, Cher, tweeted “Why did Rachel Dolezal’s parents out their daughter? It was cruel. I don’t know why she chose her path. But who doesn’t want to have black cool.”
But not everyone has been that generous. Tweets in response to Cher’s ranged from “No, you can’t just put on another race like a costume” to “Black cool? Like we’re not people with history and culture and real (expletive deleted) experiences. She faked hate crimes. How is that helping?”
Charles C.W. Cooke, writing in the National Review challenges the view that the woman has to be suffering from some kind of mental illness or personality disorder. “Lies are not necessarily delusions and it is possible that Dolezal is just a good old-fashioned fabricator,” he wrote.
Her parent’s claim they don’t know the motives behind her rejection of white society, but her father speculated that her student years in a primarily black university (where she was considered to be African American) and her advocacy for social justice has led her to be “assimilated into black culture so strongly that that’s where she transferred her identity.”
Thing is though, identity unlike belief systems or nationality cannot be “transferred”; it can only be faked. Your parents are your parents. They can be rejected or forgotten but not swapped for a different set. Your DNA won’t alter with the donning of a wig or the applying of bronzing/whitening skin creams. Your place of birth will always remain your place of birth. You might be able to go through life convincing others that you are a different ethnicity than you actually are, but that’s deception or, in some cases, self-deception, not transference.
I might be more sympathetic to this lady, whose said she doesn’t give two (expletive deleted) what others think, if it weren’t for the lies and the fact that her disguise eased her gaining a university scholarship and her rapid rise to prominence as a civil rights leader. Whatever credibility she once enjoyed is now zilch and I’m surprised that the NAACP isn’t giving her the boot.
Many years ago, I knew an accomplished artist with a similar syndrome. Adopted at birth by a German couple, he rejected his environment and after experiencing a vivid dream, he grew-up believing his mother was an Egyptian woman from Alexandria. As soon as he was old enough, he changed his name to one that sounded Arab, changed his blonde hair to black, and did his best to masquerade as an Arab for the rest of his life; although masquerade is probably the wrong word here because he genuinely believed he was.
But unlike Dolezal, he was unsuccessful; he was unable to change his facial features, his cultural habits or his German accent. Moreover, his quest was a search for his own identity and was not designed to bring benefits in terms of fame, the furtherance of his career or monetary reward.
As the New York Times has explored, while history tells us that “American history is full of tales of partly black people ‘passing’ as white….doing the reverse is much rarer. The paper cites two exceptions: Clarence King who pretended to be a black Pullman porter, whereas he was a well known “white geologist with powerful friends” and a jazz musician called Mezz Mezzrow, “who often passed himself off as black”. Another example highlighted by the Guardian, is the Texan novelist, John Howard Griffin, author of the book “Black like me.” Griffin darkened his skin so as to get African-Americans in the segregated south of the 1960s to open up to him out of a sense of kinship. “Black like me” was written to alert Americans to the pain of racism. Despite his good intentions, when the truth came out, he was publicly vilified and was beaten by assailants who left him for dead.
Together human beings of all shades and beliefs make up humanity’s rich tapestry and before we can begin to love others, we first have to love ourselves whatever our race or the soil from which we were rooted.
