Ever since I first heard about the curious case of Rachel Dolezal—the Spokane,
Washington, NAACP chapter president who has been outed and ridiculed for passing as
black—I’ve wanted to embrace her as the visage of the changing, multicultural of
America.
“If she says she’s black, then I’m willing to welcome her to the struggle for
justice and equality,” I said to my white officemate. “The more the merrier.”
But, as a daily drumbeat of details have emerged, I’ve grown increasingly
uncomfortable with what this sordid social media-driven story says—less about
Dolezal and more about those of us looking in on her obviously conflicted life. The
ridiculing pundits and Twitter wits who want to have fun are as misguided as the
more serious scholars seeking to draw sweeping conclusions about the acceptability
of malleable gender, identity, and race.
Dolezal’s story is nothing more than yet another gigantic cultural canvas on which
each of us paints an individual portrait of race in America. And, similar to the
collaboration of blind artists’ rendering their perspectives of an elephant, we all
are fixated on something unique to our specific racial frames, unable to capture the
sweeping panorama in front of us.
From my perspective, Dolezal is curiosity, a one-of-a-kind oddity of her own
fabricated making, whose professional, personal, and family drama has now been
splayed across various social media platforms. She is neither villain nor heroine in
this story and, as such, unworthy of the immense media scrutiny that she is now
garnering. Given the Warholian nature of our national obsession with celebrity and
all things racial, I expect Dolezal will have a book deal, a movie, and, perhaps, a
reality show by the end of the month.
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For more information or to speak to an expert on this topic, please contact Tanya S.
Arditi at tarditi@americanprogress.org or 202-741-6258.
