Rachel Dolezal 2I woke up yesterday morning to a story I originally believed was a joke on a satirical news site, “Leader of Spokane NAACP discovered to be a white woman.”  In my head – Yeah, right, y’all play too much. But as I scrolled through my timeline and Twitter feed, I learned that Rachel Dolezal, a white woman from Montana who apparently masqueraded her way through a prominent black existence over the last 10 years is real. Ok…..so I had questions and went digging into the stories.  My emotions on this topic ranged as the story and the issues developed. At first I was just stunned at the sheer hubris of the stunt, and then I was angry, very angry.  I was not just angry with Rachel and her Undercover Negro charade but with the countless blacks who caped for her, and then the the term “transracialism,” which manifested out of nowhere. But first, I’m going to deal with Rachel.
Rachel, in my opinion, is a pathological narcissistic liar who was emboldened by white privilege to assume an identity to which she was not entitled.  I do not believe she has a great love for the black community, in fact, I believe she holds it in great contempt.  Dolezal holds a Master’s degree from Howard University and teaches Africana studies at Eastern Washington University.  She’s President of the Spokane, WA NAACP and reportedly is a long-time activist in the community.  She is by all accounts an accomplished woman.  Here’s the thing.  All of her investment in the black community, and I am in no way minimizing anyone’s good deeds, does not entitle her to claim a cultural identity that does not belong to her because it is not a commodity that can be purchased.  Period.  And I believe, underneath it all, Rachel always knew that and it pissed her off.  No matter how “down” she was, a black card was not going to be issued, so she decided to steal one and leverage it for her professional gain.
Rachel DolezalNarcissists have a world view that justify any and all actions through their lens and their lens only.  I imagine Rachel believed that her work and commitment in the black community would gain her a level of acceptance and prominence that perhaps didn’t materialize in the ways she envisioned.  Narcissists need to feel important and validated, and perhaps Dolezal perceived her whiteness stood in the way of receiving what she felt she deserved.  So when faced with a barrier that prevented complete assimilation and therefore the status she desired, or perhaps experiencing a particularly stinging episode of rejection, Dolezal, in what has to be one of the most brazen acts of white privilege and narcissism ever, decided to just become a black woman because she felt she was entitled to it.
Seriously think about that.  When we talk about appropriation usually we talk about folks whom we presume to be uninformed about our history, our struggles, and therefore lack a true appreciation of our culture when they appropriate it for themselves.  That is not the case with Dolezal.  She has made our history, her business, literally.  She knows all too well that as a people, we were robbed of everything that ever belonged to us, our homeland, birthright, language, lineage, religion, family structure, cultural identity, economic security, dignity…..basically our humanity and right to exist on this planet because throughout history white folks, through white privilege, decided their interests superseded ours. Despite that, armed with full knowledge and intent, Dolezal exercised that privilege, to co-opt that very culture for her personal gain. She wore the cultural identity of an oppressed people like a costume, and then turned around and leveraged a career off of it.  Her lies and deceptions were targeted squarely at the black community, we were her victims.  She needed us to accept her lies to satisfy her narcissism, but I also believe she got a great deal of satisfaction out of our willing participation in our own deception.  It doubled as a boost to her ego and as as form of punishment against a community that did not give her the status to which she felt entitled.  I believe that’s why she sought positions of prominence and leadership, a place in academia, because the greater the spotlight the greater the narcissistic reward, and the more embarrassment/punishment for the black community, even if she was the only one who knew.  We were all pawns on the board.
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Dolezal created a caricature of what she thought it meant to be a black woman, and she did so knowing full well the painful history and use of black caricatures in the subjugation of black women.  She worked hard to outdo black people at well, being black often in an almost mocking way – wearing braids, going “natural”, digging up a fake black father, talking about watching “Twelve Years a Slave” in the theater as the only black person offering recommendations on how to deal with the white movie goers (yes, I’m serious).  Her appropriations oftentimes were stereotypical and borderline racist, when  you realize that all along she did them as a white woman, who always knew she was a white woman, and even enlisting the silence of her family to not “blow her cover” as she ran her charade.   The fact that Dolezal read everything she knew about the black experience from a book, may shed some light as to why she fails to truly appreciate the fact that our culture goes much deeper than our appearance, our food, or our music.  In essence, and ironically, it is truly a black thing, something she did not and could not, and apparently did not care to understand.
Narcissists, much like cultural appropriators, do not care about being offensive, which is why Dolezal doesn’t care about the lies she told and doesn’t “give two shits” about her detractors.  Dolezal does not care about the African-American women she claimed to represent because she was only in it for herself.  Dolezal presumably feels that as long as she attended a historically black college, was down for the cause, married a black guy, and looked the part, more or less, which is the MOST reductionist and offensive distillation of the black experience that I’ve ever heard, she’s good and we should be good too. She even went as far as to allegedly manufacture hate crimes perhaps to establish street cred in the black community, all in an effort to elevate her status.  And it is that hubris, that level of audacity and unconscionable gall to just waltz in to a culture and feel like you can own it wholesale, that red-lines her privilege and narcissism.  This was always about Rachel Dolezal.  It was never about anything else.  She’s an entitled narcissistic woman, doing civil rights advocacy work while wearing blackface.  Whether the work is about the people or about reinforcing her lie and therefore her career is up for debate. I don’t know her personally, and as this story unfolds, perhaps there will be information that comes forward which tempers my current view.  What I do know is she always had the option to do the work as herself, she simply chose not to, and representing herself as a black woman came with clear advantages.
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Now for my kinfolk who came sailing in from Capetown to defend Ms. Rachel.  We are not for sale.  Our identity is not for sale.  We do not offer a layaway or work-study program for any interested parties to adopt our cultural identity.  It’s not on the damn menu!!  So can we please stop covering for people who have so little value for our space on this planet and so much personal entitlement they feel they can co-opt our identity at any time, for any reason? It does not matter that she “did good”.  If I go outside right now and rescue a litter a drowning puppies while dressed in a swastika covered bodysuit, the swastikas will not be overlooked or dismissed, and rightfully so!  Blackface is no different, and yes, light-skin blackface is still blackface.  I do not care about the issues, ills, messes, or idiots, we have in our community, those things do not devalue our right to exist, nor does it grant a “right to violate” pass to Rachel or folks like her.  If you made this argument, you are a part of the problem.  We have to stop making everything OK, and accepting blame for other people’s moral and ethical failings.  I saw more people acquiesce to this foolishness and turn it into buffoonery then to see it for what it truly was and understand the larger ramifications.  Our collective response to events like this, set the tone for the future.
I want all of our communities to live together in peace.  I welcome collaboration and efforts for greater understanding among people from all backgrounds and to heal the wounds from our past, but in order for that to happen, there has to be the basic respect for our existence and the right to retain our existence, our culture, and identity unto ourselves.  All of this nonsense regarding “transracialism”, is an attempt, in my option, to conquer the final frontier, to take the only thing that is left, our identity.  Getting to a post-racial America is not about ignoring racial differences, or making them disappear, it’s about respecting them, and not making them a basis for disparate treatment.  Co-opting them, because you somehow “feel” black, which is ridiculous to me because I don’t even know how you can articulate that feeling if you’ve never actually been black or experienced life as a black person and never will, is just a thinly-veiled attempt to break apart and diffuse the black community.  So now people want to argue you can simply choose to be black, like an elective?  Can you get how offensive that is?  It completely separates us from our past our history, and makes it irrelevant, which I suspect, is the point.  It disposed of the ugly history, in the most passive aggressive and disappointing way ever, by completely ignoring it, and co-opts the transgender movement to do it.  Damn.
At the end of the day, I hope Rachel gets the help she needs, and I hope that she continues to do the work in the community that she has committed to, but as herself.  Respecting a culture, means respecting the right for it to exist without having to place yourself at the center of it.  Not sure that anyone actually gets that anymore.