Rachel Dolezal needs to go sit down somewhere
I like to think that decades ago, Spokane NAACP president Rachel Dolezal was innocently watching Steve Martin’s opening scene from The Jerk — the one where he recalls being born a poor black child — and hit upon what seemed like a great idea.
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Crazy thing is, she almost pulled it off. Unfortunately for her, and the NAACP, life ain’t a movie. Dolezal has been masquerading as black for a number of years, a feat which culminated in her identifying herself as African American on her application to serve on a community board that dealt with local police.
Her mother, Ruthianne Dolezal, who claims to have been out of contact with her daughter for years, says Rachel’s Al Jolson impression began when they adopted black children. (What’s crazier is that Rachel has since taken full custody of one of her black one-time siblings.)
There are so many ways this could go. We could plunge down the rabbit hole right now. I could ask if she was ever called upon to join in a group rendition of the Living Single theme song. I could ask how many books could be made from my hand in spades. I could even ask where her edges were when she decided to go for the Janet Jackson Poetic Justice-era braids. But beyond the jokes (how was her potato salad?) to be made, Dolezal is guilty of trivializing the very real struggles actual black women face. She also runs the very real risk of throwing doubt on any and all of the good work the NAACP may have done in her area.
There’s a very real temptation, for some, to read this as a tale of one’s wayward appreciation for black people and culture. For all the tangible benefits of white privilege, one could say, Dolezal chose to cast those aside, don an only sometimes convincing disguise, and live as a black person in America. What could be so wrong with a white American loving black culture, or desiring to change the status of black citizens so much so that they were willing to live as one of them?
Everything. At any given time, Dolezal, unlike 99 percent of other (read: actual) black folk, could have given up the charade, admitted she didn’t get the allure of Comicview, moved, and resumed life as a white American. Her yearslong caricature of a black woman (here she is discussing her “black hair’’ in a speech) was undergirded in white privilege, if only because she could have hit the brakes at any time. Oprah may have more money than Ben Affleck, Dolezal, and the rest of us combined, but she can’t put up a red cent to throw down the color of her skin in order to never have to fear public displays of racism. You don’t even get that as one of the perks of being President of the United States.
Dolezal knew the struggles of black women so well she taught a class on them. She woke up and lived her life, each and every day, with a clear view of how wrong it was that she, a white woman birthed to two white parents, decided to play chicken with something that gets black teenage girls slammed on the concrete by police, yards away from a pool party. Make no mistake, Dolezal was black in every way except the ways that matter, and she had the ability to stop. She lied to people, and collected a check on the strength of that lie.
If this seems like an overreaction, if it seems like black folk and those in favor of social justice have made a mountain of a sugar…err...molehill, ask yourself this: Who was the last white person whose effort to raise the status of black citizens was rebuffed based on the color of their skin? Plenty of white people see pushback when attempting to “help’’ black folks. But whiteness isn’t the rub there. We don’t reject Ann Coulter’s advice because she’s white. We reject it because she’s wrong. We don’t ridicule Rand Paul because he’s never known the torture of having your durag slip off in the night before picture day. We ridicule him because he happens to be ridiculous. And, because history matters, consider that Dolezal wasn’t the president of a chapter of an organization started with the help of white American liberals. She didn’t have to be black to come alongside an organization serving black folks. She didn’t need to live a lie. Hell, she didn’t even need a tan.
At least some of us can rest in the knowledge that this lady knew something was up.
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