Of course, there’s nothing new about people passing for a member of a different race or ethnicity. But their reasons for doing so were invariably to escape a life of discrimination, oppression, or even worse.
Most notably, Blacks in America passed for Whites to escape the legacy of slavery, including dehumanizing Jim Crow laws; Jews in Europe passed for Christians/Aryans to escape the scourge of anti-Semitism, including the genocidal spectre of Nazi concentration camps.
In this context, it’s understandable that a White might want to pass for Black in post-Apartheid South Africa. But only God knows why a White would want to do so in the United States, notwithstanding specious claims about affirmative action and reverse discrimination. This is why the identity fraud Rachel A. Dolezal perpetrated is so stupefying.
She has professed an affinity for black people since she was a teenager, when her parents adopted four black children. She chose a college where she could immerse herself in racial issues. She married a black man and built a reputation as an advocate for civil rights.
(New York Times, June 12, 1015)
Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with any of the above. On the contrary, all of it is quite commendable, especially for a White girl.
Yet I do marvel at this curious thing: why pretend to be Black to do what would’ve been even more commendable if she presented herself as White? Not to mention that White folks not only have a distinguished record of working for the NAACP, but were instrumental in founding this association for the advancement of Black folks 105 years ago.
Even so, Dolezal’s identity crisis is not the issue. And it’s probably expecting too much for her to spare us a self-serving explanation/confessional, which would only add insult to the injury she’s already caused.
She clearly needs psychological therapy to deal with whatever childhood trauma or racial ideation triggered her extraordinary decision to live as a Black woman. But one has to wonder what motivated the conspiracy of silence, for so many years, among her family, friends, and, above all, the Black man she married fifteen years ago – with her plainly White (biological) parents in attendance.
Instead, the issue is the categorical support the NAACP is giving her, as the June 12 edition of the Washington Post reported:
One’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or a disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership.
After all, lying about one’s racial identity should be disqualifying, especially for work with an organization established to advance the lives of people without denying the intrinsic value of their racial identity. What’s more, her lies should trigger criminal charges for perpetrating this insidious fraud.
Moreover, it does not reflect well on the NAACP’s institutional integrity that it can so blithely stand by a White woman who pretended to be Black to enroll at historically Black Howard University — complete with scholarship funds that might have been given to a more worthy applicant. She even gained employment at various institutions, including at Eastern Washington University as an expert on African-American culture and at the NAACP itself as president of its local chapter in Spokane, Washington.
But hailing any good work she has done under false pretense only advances the moral hazard of the ends justifying the means. Besides, it’s not as if she faked her racial identity to be a more effective social worker in blighted Black neighborhoods. She was purportedly working for the advancement of Black folks in a state where Blacks compose only 3.5 percent of the population for Christ’s sake!
Frankly, this White woman (in her own version of “blackface” — complete with alternating cornrow and kinky twist hairstyles) has made a mockery of the daily struggles Black women face. And, perversely, she has used the presumptions of White privilege, which is the bane of every Black American’s existence, to do so.
This is why the NAACP must fire her forthwith.
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Saturday, at 8:53 a.m.