A take on the resignation of a former NAACP leader
Last week Monday, Rachel Dolezal, president of the Spokane, Washington branch for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), announced her resignation amid a furor of media coverage erupting from an interview with Dolezal’s parents. They claimed their daughter, a civil rights activist and Africana Studies professor at Eastern Washington University, has been pretending to be black for years although she is white. Dolezal repudiated the accusation in an interview with NBC news where she unapologetically maintained, “I identify as black.”
Growing up in Montana, Dolezal has expressed that she always felt isolated with respect to her identity for her entire life. Between the age of 15 and 17, her parents adopted four black children. She was immediately drawn to them, inspiring in her a “tremendous affinity with African-Americans,” according to Dolezal’s father. She felt responsible for being the “link” for her trans-racial siblings to their black heritage. She eventually became a graduate student in art at Howard University, producing work revolving around the black experience. Subsequently, she went on to teach Africana studies at North Idaho College, and at Eastern Washington University.
In the race-fixated landscape of the US, the former NAACP leader’s decision to, “self-identity as black” has stirred an international debate over what constitutes one’s racial identity. While some actually applaud her actions and strike up comparisons to the recent transformation of Caitlyn Jenner, a transgender female, others deplore her actions claiming them to be deceitful and misleading. Some concede that, while it is one thing to embrace and indulge in black culture, it is quite another to physically change one’s appearance to look black.
Baz Dreisinger, author of “Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture” warns that Dolezal’s darkened skin tone, “taps into all of these issues around blackface and wearing blackness and that whole cultural legacy, which makes it that much more vile.”
It’s challenging for anyone’s sense of identity when their appearance does not match the person they believe themselves to be. Rachel Dolezal is a woman who, despite her advocacy for black rights, her magnetism to the black culture and her personal identification with the black experience, will most likely never be seen as a member of the black community because she is white. Dolezal’s identification with black culture should not mean she has to reassign her race, darken her skin or change her hair to live this cultural identity. Her decision to pose as a black woman does not make Dolezal a complete fraud, but rather, it is a poignant example of an individual’s struggle for society to make the “right” assumptions based on their appearance alone. A world where people will accept one’s cultural identity without assuming it must match their race will be the sign of true societal advancement. Hopefully, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, we will one day live in a society where people are judged by the “content of their character” rather than the, “colour of their skin.”