Tag: transracialism
Dolezal’s Deceit Demonstrates A Valuable Truth

Dolezal’s Deceit Demonstrates A Valuable Truth

The curious case of Rachel Dolezal has sparked furious commentary about her deceit, her arrogance, her narcissism. But I see something more in her strange tale: a reminder that race is but a social construct. As geneticists told us years ago, there really isn’t any such thing as race.

Human beings are 99.9 percent genetically identical, Craig Venter and Francis Collins, who led research on the human genome, announced in 2000. As Duana Fullwiley, a medical anthropologist, has put it, “There is no genetic basis for race.”

Still, human beings are deeply invested in the concept. Our lizard brains are attuned to superficial differences — hair texture, skin color, language. Tens of thousands of years ago, Homo sapiens depended on their ability to distinguish friend from foe in a flash. If another creature standing upright and using opposable thumbs looked like me, he was a friend. If he didn’t, well, whack him with a stick.

And, unhappily, we’ve not evolved much beyond that basic instinct.

But primal identification of “the other” is no longer necessary for survival. In fact, in the 21st century, it impedes human progress.

Look no further than the massacre that took place on Wednesday evening at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. An assailant opened fire during prayer meeting — during prayer meeting — and killed nine people. Police have identified the suspect as a young white man, Dylann Storm Roof, who allegedly spewed racist stereotypes and championed white supremacy. They have labeled the atrocity a hate crime.

That’s one of the more horrific examples of the racism that is fueled by fear and hatred of the other, but it stands out only for its extremes. Every day, discrimination overwhelms routine encounters — between police and civilians, between teachers and pupils, between employers and job applicants.

And I’d be remiss if I suggested that bigotry is a habit practiced only by whites. While institutional racism is the province of the powerful — and, in the United States, the powerful are still mostly white — discrimination based on difference is a human tradition, passed on from one generation to the next, among black families, brown families, tan families, pink families. A Muslim woman in a hijab, a group of Latinas speaking Spanish, a black man in dreadlocks — all draw an instinctive inner scowl from some person who looks or sounds a bit different.

So Dolezal shook us up a bit. We couldn’t tell by looking. If she could be so authentically “black” as to fool her constituents at the Spokane chapter of the NAACP despite the fact that she was born “white,” doesn’t that tell us something about the superficiality of these differences?

Now, I’m not excusing the lady’s lies. You can hardly champion social justice while standing on a foundation of fraud. There is no excuse for her mendacity, no matter how noble she believed her motives to be.

But her story ought to remind us just how flimsy this business of race really is. Even “black culture” and “white culture” are permeable concepts, easily penetrated.

When I was younger, stereotypes that attempted to limit black accomplishments were common. The list of our supposed shortcomings was long — and absurd. Black people couldn’t be distance runners (did anyone tell the Kenyans?), couldn’t play tennis (you’ve heard of Serena Williams), or play golf (well, Tiger Woods used to). And certainly we weren’t smart enough to be astrophysicists, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

And while black Americans didn’t have the cultural cachet to invent a long list of limits for whites, we responded with a few stereotypes of our own. As just one example, we believed that white teens couldn’t dance. They didn’t have rhythm. That myth, too, has been exploded by any number of young white rockers — and multiple contestants on those competitive talent shows.

Humankind is not yet ready to acknowledge what science stands ready to teach us: Race does not exist. We seem to have a primal need to divide, to separate, to exclude. Categories provide us some strange comfort.

But the race-tinged sagas playing out on the evening news ought to force us to think about the ways in which those categories limit us all.

(Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Rachel Dolezal Proves Race Not A Fixed Or Objective Fact

Rachel Dolezal Proves Race Not A Fixed Or Objective Fact

Of the 60 people who co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909, only seven were, in fact, “colored.” Most of the organization’s founders were white liberals like Mary White Ovington. Its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, is named for Joel Spingarn, who was Jewish and white.

Point being, white people have been intricately involved in the NAACP struggle for racial justice from day one. So Rachel Dolezal did not need to be black to be president of the organization’s Spokane chapter. That she chose to present herself as such anyway, adopting a frizzy “natural” hairstyle and apparently somehow darkening her skin, has put her at the bullseye of the most irresistible watercooler story of the year. This will be on Blackish next season; just wait and see.

As you doubtless know, the 37-year-old Dolezal was outed last week by her estranged parents. In response, they say, to a reporter’s inquiry, they told the world her heritage includes Czech, Swedish, and German roots, but not a scintilla of black. In the resulting mushroom cloud of controversy, Dolezal was forced to resign her leadership of the Spokane office. Interviewed Tuesday by Matt Lauer on Today, she made an awkward attempt to explain and/or justify herself. “I identify as black,” she said, like she thinks she’s the Caitlyn Jenner of race. It was painful to watch.

Given that Dolezal sued historically black Howard University in 2002 for allegedly discriminating against her because she is white, it’s hard not to see a certain opportunism in her masquerade. Most people who, ahem, “identify as black” don’t have the option of trying on another identity when it’s convenient.

That said, it’s hard to be too exercised over this. Dolezal doesn’t appear to have done any harm, save to her own dignity and reputation. One suspects there are deep emotional issues at play, meaning the kindest thing we can do is give her space and time to work them out.

Besides, this story’s most pointed moral has less to do with Dolezal and her delusions than with us and ours. Meaning America’s founding myth, the one that tells us race is a fixed and objective fact.

It isn’t. Indeed, in 2000, after mapping the genetic codes of five people — African-American, Caucasian, Asian, and Hispanic — researchers announced they could find no difference among them. “The concept of race,” one of them said, “has no scientific basis.” The point isn’t that race is not real; the jobless rate, the mass incarceration phenomenon, and the ghosts of murdered boys from Emmett Till to Tamir Rice argue too persuasively otherwise.

Rather, it’s that it’s not real in the way we conceive it in America where, as historian Matt Wray once put it, the average 19-year-old regards it as a “set of facts about who people are, which is somehow tied to blood and biology and ancestry.” In recent years, Wray and scholars like David Roediger and Nell Irvin Painter have done path-breaking work exploding that view. To read their research is to understand that what we call race is actually a set of cultural likenesses, shared experiences and implicit assumptions, i.e., that white men can’t jump and black ones can’t conjugate.

To try to make it more than that, to posit it as an immutable truth, is to discover that, for all its awesome power to determine quality of life or lack thereof, race is a chimera. There is no there, there. The closer you look, the faster it disappears.

Consider: If race were really what Wray’s average 19-year-old thinks it is, there could never have been a Rachel Dolezal; her lie would have been too immediately transparent. So ultimately, her story is the punchline to a joke most of us don’t yet have ears to hear. After all, this white lady didn’t just try to pass herself off as black.

She got away with it.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Woman Resigns As NAACP Chapter Head Amid Claims She Lied About Being Black

Woman Resigns As NAACP Chapter Head Amid Claims She Lied About Being Black

By Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Rachel Dolezal, president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, resigned Monday amid accusations that she is a white woman posing as a black woman.

In a statement posted on the chapter’s Facebook page, Dolezal, whose parents say she is white, did not directly address allegations that she lied about being a black woman.

“While challenging the construct of race is at the core of evolving human consciousness,” Dolezal wrote that she did not want to distract from the larger cause of racial justice and would step aside.

“I have waited in deference while others expressed their feelings, beliefs, confusions and even conclusions — absent the full story,” Dolezal wrote. “I am consistently committed to empowering marginalized voices and believe that many individuals have been heard in the last hours and days that would not otherwise have had a platform to weigh in on this important discussion.”

Dolezal said vice president Naima Quarles-Burnley would take over.

Dolezal had been expected to address the firestorm that erupted last week over her personal identity at the local chapter’s Monday meeting.

But that meeting was canceled Sunday “due to the need to continue discussion with regional and national NAACP leaders,” according to an unsigned note on the chapter’s Facebook page.

Last week, top officials of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had stood by Dolezal.

In a statement Friday, after her parents’ allegations were first reported in the Coeur d’Alene Press, the NAACP said Dolezal was involved in a “legal issue with her family.”

The group also stressed that anyone can fight for civil rights, regardless of his or her race. “One’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership,” it said in a statement.

It added: “In every corner of this country, the NAACP remains committed to securing political, educational and economic justice for all people, and we encourage Americans of all stripes to become members and serve as leaders in our organization.”

(Tina Susman contributed to this report.)

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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