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Rachel Dolezal – Transracial Pioneer?

Rachel Dolezal – Transracial Pioneer?

J. BROOKS SPECTOR considers the uproar over the racial “outing” of Rachel Dolezal and what it says about race – and the people who talk about it.

Back in 1992, this writer and his family moved back to America from South Africa. The very first item of business, as soon as we had locked down a place to live, was getting two daughters into school, especially since the US school year had already begun two weeks earlier. Because we had rented our house so we could be in a particular school district, off we went to the appropriate junior high school (the rough equivalent of the South African senior primary school) to begin the admission process. Sitting with the admissions staff member, we dug into a daunting pile of forms and provided the required information from medical records and previous school records, provided the necessary proof of residency and completed a biographical form for incoming students – including information on hobbies and interests.

Given our family makeup, we paused for a moment at the question marked race, ignored it, and then went on to complete the rest of the questions. We handed in the whole pack of forms and when the admissions officer reviewing our paperwork came to the race question, she looked up and told us we had forgotten to tick the box. Hmm. Dutifully chagrined, we checked two blocks this time – white and black/African-American/native of the African continent – and handed the forms back to her. The response was a stern admonition, no, you must pick just one, not two.

At that point, after years of living in South Africa, with its overwhelming interest in race, the writer felt constrained to ask that, given the inter-racial family sitting directly across from her in her office, which one of the two parents of this child did not exist as far as the state of Maryland was concerned. Eventually, we compromised and decided to allow the school to pick our child’s race on the basis of what the official believed would best suit the school’s reporting requirements concerning racial balance and minority admissions.

As a result of this astonishing back and forth, our family officially ended up with one rather pale-skin-toned, dark-blonde-haired-black/African-American/native-of-the-African-continent-child and a second who was slightly darker in complexion (but with brunette hair) – and Maryland was now allowed to tick the right census boxes to its bureaucratic heart’s content. Based on that experience, after thinking about it for while, the writer actually finds he has a bit of sympathy for Rachel Dolezal amidst the controversy now swirling around her. Despite her increasingly convoluted story, her supporters have been sympathetic to her assertion that despite her obvious genetic origins, she is actually black. For her and her supporters, race – and one’s formal racial designation – is significantly a social construct much more than it is a biological one.

Dolezal, for those who might have missed out on her story (or who were otherwise caught up in those FIFA or al-Bashir scandals, or who have been victims of some really irksome, extended, repetitive load shedding), is the American woman who had become the head of the NAACP chapter (a major black oriented civil rights body) in eastern Washington state. Along the way, out there in Spokane, Washington, she had been accepted as just another rather fair-skinned black American with an interest in social justice and the arts. Dolezal’s life trajectory, however, was actually much more complex than her simply being a rather light-skin-toned black American.

In fact, she was born to parents who traced their background to northern European antecedents (with a bit of native American thrown in to spice things up). If one summed up the news reports on her parents, her family comprised Christian fundamentalist, survivalist, back to the land people and that, over time, her had parents adopted two young black children as well as their biological ones. While Rachel was at university, she had married a black man, she had given birth to a “biracial” child, and, along the way, she had taken control over one of her adopted black siblings after her marriage ended.

In recent days, she has told television audiences and reporters that she had effectively felt herself to be a black person ever since she was five years old (eliding around the more pointed question in such interviews of whether or not she is actually African-American). However, deeper reporting into her personal circumstances then noted that while she was studying at Howard University (one of America’s most celebrated historically black colleges and universities), she had sued that school over discrimination against her in her academic career, by virtue of her being white. She lost in court.

Then, moving back out West, she had apparently begun to re-shape her appearance and she eventually became the head of the Spokane, Washington branch of the NAACP. Further, she became active in local government, community civil rights advocacy and advisory bodies – as a self-identified black person. (Interestingly, looking back at the NAACP’s history, that organisation had been dragged out of its ineffectual, genteel tradition and on into much vigorous social activism by President Walter White, who was, it seems, just 5/32nds black himself by commonly understood racial heritage. Like Dolezal, White had also sported blonde hair and blue eyes.)

In recent days, however, Dolezal has been “outed” by her birth parents over her genetic makeup – parents with whom she has had a serious falling-out over the years. As a result, the debate has now moved on to a consideration of just how concrete the usual racial categorisations really are. How rooted they are in biology, versus whether racial identity is the subject of one’s own internal feelings and desires on the matter, at least as much as one’s own physical characteristics. For some, this has put racial categorisation on a par with gender, leading to debate over whether Rachel Dolezal and Caitlyn Jenner should now be seen as somehow equivalent circumstances.

South Africans, of course, have something of a dog in this fight too. The very nature of racial categorisation in South Africa has long depended on an outmoded model that spoke of the immutability of race, despite a scientific consensus that the only real “race” is the human race and that genetic variation within those traditional “races” is actually more extensive than the physically obvious features like skin colour and hair texture that have usually been relied upon to differentiate the separate “races” of homo sapiens. (In fact, the very term, race, has, over time, taken on significantly different meanings historically. It was common until the 20th century, after all, to speak of those laudable characteristics in the Teutonic race, versus the less salutary ones inherent in the Latin or Slavic races, in addition to yet other more invidious distinctions between Asians, Africans and Europeans.)

South African racial classifications were sufficiently bizarre that there was an actual formal legal process one could apply to so as to obtain a racial reclassification (and thus to change the legally approved opportunities for the duly reclassified individual). Social satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys used to bring the house down in theatres whenever he read the full list of people officially reclassified, as published in the Hansard. He would intone the roll call: so many Africans who became Coloured, so many Coloured people who became white, and so many Chinese who became white, always ending with his punch line, “I’m not making this up, you know!”

But, of course, these classifications and reclassifications carried enormous consequences for the people concerned. To move “up” the scale conveyed real benefits. As the classification mechanisms were formalised after 1948, numerous people tried to pass – for white and for Coloured.

This phenomenon was similar to the circumstances of the US as well, although the legalities in America were less strictly drawn. Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain, and the film made from it, document the pain such decisions inflicted on those who passed – and those who stayed. South Africa’s widely reported stories of Sandra Laing and Happy Sindane – among so many others – were clearly enormously painful as well to the individuals involved. And these stories spoke with much angst about the nature of and the moving back and forth across what was ultimately a rather mutable colour line.

Almost inevitably, because passing in America meant very light skin-toned blacks became white, John Howard Griffin’s book 1961, Black Like Me, had such an incendiary impact. Griffin, a white reporter in the South, had shaved his hair and carried out a skin darkening process, using a drug used to treat the “Michael Jackson disease” as well as leather dyes so as to turn himself into a black man and, thereby passing over into black society in what was then the still-thoroughly-segregated South. The book was first serialised in the black-oriented magazine, Sepia, and then, when published as a separate volume, it became a near-instant best seller.

Dolezal’s circumstances and her still-ongoing public revelations (or humiliations) have now cost her her job with the NAACP as well as her involvement with local government structures. Her life will never be the same. But she has put the question of just how fixed and certain a racial label can be, right on the table – and in full view. This is, of course, part of a larger social change in America as a growing number of people have varied racial heritages that no longer comport with those fixed racial categories.

After years of lobbying for such a change, the US Census Bureau now says, “The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. [Italics added] In addition, it is recognised that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as ‘American Indian’ and ‘White.’ People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race.”

The Census office guidelines then go on to explain, “An individual’s response to the race question is based upon self-identification [Italics added]. The Census Bureau does not tell individuals which boxes to mark or what heritage to write in. For the first time in Census 2000, individuals were presented with the option to self-identify with more than one race and this continued with the 2010 Census. People who identify with more than one race may choose to provide multiple races in response to the race question. For example, if a respondent identifies as ‘Asian’ and ‘White,’ they may respond to the question on race by checking the appropriate boxes that describe their racial identities and/or writing in these identities on the spaces provided.”

Racial figures are, of course, a feature of many government decisions, just as with the writer’s children, including the provision of government benefits to school districts based on race, with the formulas usually providing more funding to districts with higher proportions of minorities than others. But Census enumerators do not carry out pencil tests on a person’s hair to verify the self-labelling that takes place, the way South Africa’s race classification bodies used to do in order to determine which category an individual would be consigned to – thereby determining the rest of their life’s circumstances.

Perhaps the furore over Rachel Dolezal’s self-assignment as a black American, in spite of her birth parents’ vigorous disagreement with her decision, also speaks to a growing realisation that those racial categories – ancient verities – are now falling away, slowly but surely. And perhaps, too, the challenge contained in William Plomer’s 1926 novel, Turbott Wolfe, written when the author was only 23, will presage the future. In Plomer’s novel, the title character, a merchant and political dreamer in colonial KwaZulu Natal, eventually determines to embrace miscegenation as the real key to Africa’s future. Was Rachel Dolezal simply implementing this idea in her head, in advance of the biology?

Perhaps improbably rising to Dolezal’s defence has been basketball immortal, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. After arguing race is largely a social construct, the ex-athlete concluded, “You can’t deny that Dolezal has proven herself a fierce and unrelenting champion for African-Americans politically and culturally. Perhaps some of this sensitivity comes from her adoptive black siblings. Whatever the reason, she has been fighting the fight for several years and seemingly doing a first-rate job. Not only has she led her local chapter of the NAACP, she teaches classes related to African-American culture at Eastern Washington University and is chairwoman of a police oversight committee monitoring fairness in police activities. Bottom line: The black community is better off because of her efforts… [Dolezal has] merely selected a cultural preference of which cultural group she most identifies with. Who can blame her? Anyone who listens to the Isaac Hayes song, ‘Shaft,’ wants to be black—for a little while anyway.” While that last bit of evidence isn’t science, that’s not really such a terrible argument, is it? DM

Photo: A screen grab of Rachel Dolezal’s appearance on NBC’s Today show with Matt Lauer.

Read more:

  • Rachel Dolezal, in Center of Storm, Is Defiant: ‘I Identify as Black’ at the New York Times
  • Rachel Dolezal sued Howard for racial discrimination. Because she was white. At the Washington Post
  • Race activist Rachel Dolezal: ‘I identify as black’ at the BBC
  • Rachel Dolezal sued Howard University for discrimination at Politico
  • Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Let Dolezal Be Black, No Such Thing As Race Anyway at Truthrevolt.org
  • Before Rachel Dolezal, there was Walter White at the Christian Science Monitor
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