The Dolezal Debate
Inspired by the writing style of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Karina offers an insight into the black community’s dilemma with finding their place in a society that seeks to shut them out.
I would argue that I really only understood when I was 16. I walked into my teacher’s classroom and cried for a half hour. I didn’t have the cumulative GPA or the ACT score to get into the nation’s top ten schools. I would never get into graduate school and I would never get the job I believed my work ethic deserved. This is a problem I’d seen for years. I was always too smart. I always tried too hard. I did too much. I was too much. I never really understood why.
“What are you running from, Karina?” she asked me. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I asked for clarification. “What are you running to then?” I still didn’t really understand what she meant. I thought I was running towards the economic success of capitalism I had been denied my entire life. I thought that was because of my situation. I was confused. She looked into my eyes. Her brown orbs went deeper than mine, into my mind. Then it was like all at once I understood.
Black. Brown. Curly hair. Thick lips. Wide nose. That’s what is stopping me. That is what I am running from. But how could I be? Beyonce, Barack Obama, Serena Williams, they all showed me that excellence comes from hard work. Or at least I thought. I immediately felt tired. My lungs hurt and my brown legs were sore. I felt trapped in a black box. Where did this feeling come from and when will it leave? I didn’t ask for this and I don’t deserve it. I had to make it go away.
She smiled at me, “That’s what you’re running towards.” Change.
In 2015, an expose was published on a woman named Rachel Dolezal. The shocking revelation was made that the president of the NAACP sector in Washington and affluent black activist was actually a biologically white woman of purely European descent posing as a Black American woman. Confirmed by Dolezal’s biological parents, in recent years, Dolezal came running forward to defend herself.
“I identify as black,” Dolezal states in an interview with the TODAY show. “It was from a very young age that I started identifying with the black experience.” To Dolezal, she endured the “black experience” with her four adoptive brothers and sisters at the hands of her abusive parents. “It wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to call me an indentured servant,” she writes in her memoir “In Full Color: Finding my place in a Black and White World.” I want to know what black and white world Dolezal is running to.
There is an indisputable truth to her understanding of the “black experience.” The black label, the socially-constructed, politically disenfranchising, systematically disadvantaging title of “black.” It dates back to the first Africans brought over on those infamous wooden concoctions built on the dreams of colonization and guided by the aspirations of white supremacy. That “black,” that “blackness” was made to struggle, to run. It was built to fall like an old empire or a neighborhood with one too many brown bodies in it. The “black experience” that Dolezal wants so badly to accept and us black folk so badly want to reject, was founded upon the beaten and broken backs of blacks enslaved, freed, segregated, and imprisoned. As hard as we try to run away from what was created for us, we forget how to take it back. Rachel Dolezal knew.
Nothing is new here. The roots run so deep, but it’s sprouted so many different branches — those who weren’t allowed to bloom, and others, like Dolezal, who, however benevolent, grew like weeds, consuming everything in their path simply because they could.
“It’s more complicated than me being black or white…It was more than the visible appearance, I had to go through the experience,” she explains to the TODAY show. The scary part about this is that it is about visibly appearing black, or brown, or simply non-white. That’s how they get us. They built the system off of the natural human phenomena of phenotypic variation. The “experience” Dolezal speaks of is one that comes only from visibly appearing to be not white. There are white-passing minorities in every race and even those people, who are actually black or brown, do not fully endure the weight of being black in America; their experience is completely different. It is not the struggle that makes the black experience, but the experience that makes the struggle. Running for that long is a struggle. Always running.
“I certainly can’t be seen as white and be Isaiah’s mom,” Dolezal claims in an interview. My mom is white. That may lighten my skin but it does not save me from being socially trapped within my own blackness. While no one would say I am white, colorism had made my community question whether I can even be called black. However, in situations in which it is convenient, any black person previously on the fence would say that I am black and Rachel Dolezal is not.
I had heard little about Dolezal in 2015 when her controversy broke. The black community told me not to be concerned with the ramblings of white liberals while nine people were massacred in a church in Charleston. Still running. But it wasn’t the black community I was worried about a few years later. I was worried about the fuel Dolezal’s “transracial” would add to the supremacist fire. Charlottesville, Virginia made headlines around the time I first heard of Rachel Dolezal and her ideals. I couldn’t help but wonder if her actions of privilege helped stir the giant elixir that started with Bin Laden in 2001 and topped off by the 2016 election.
The elixir that white supremacists drank before pouring out swastikas, confederate flags, and infamous red caps with white words printed above the bill. While this was not a direct result of anything, I couldn’t help but ponder Dolezal’s seemingly unintentional contribution to the violent racial disparities taking shape in the current climate. Why would someone who believes they are something work so hard to destroy who they are?
Dolezal’s goal is to manipulate the public into believing she is a black American woman. She struggles — struggles to bend the modern understandings of racial relations to validate her rather complex understanding of blackness. The issue is that no matter what reason says, she really believes that she is a black woman. Dolezal believes that her emotional struggles as a child and personality win her a seat at the “negro” table. When asked about her lawsuit against Howard University she states, “The reason my full tuition scholarship was taken away was because ‘these opportunities needed to go to other people’ and ‘I probably had white relatives who could help me out.’ I did think that was an injustice.”
At 41 years old, Dolezal came of age in the 1980s and 90s, the first time in the United States where it became culturally “cool” to be black. Hip hop, R&B, and rap produced some of the most prevalent artists in the music industry. Clothes, music, food, sports, arts, and television became enthralled in the smooth, jazzy blackness of America. It’s no surprise that some white people wanted to be included. Obviously in a way that maintained their systematic privilege. Wearing bindis at Coachella, dreadlocks or cornrows becoming the new “ghetto” stylistic choice in music videos; all the while, the system continued to discriminate as the “War On Drugs” and mass incarceration were born at the same time. Maybe Dolezal carried that with her; a way to cope with childhood trauma. It makes me wonder at what point with white emotional trauma become a personal journey and not a televised struggle of pity at the expense of the underprivileged.
“I felt out of place in a white household… I felt like I had to oppress parts of myself to survive socially.”
(Dolezal on BBC Newsnight in 2017)
Throughout American history, certain aspects of identity have been thrust upon individuals and used to oppress one group while uplifting another. It is about social survival; the preservation of one group while destroying another. It is physicalization of Darwin’s most controversial prophecy: only the fittest survive. But, when you craft the system yourself and trap others inside of it, you create a situation in which you are always the fittest. You always survive.
Race has been a problematic aspect of American history since the founding of the nation. Its definitions and understandings have shifted and transformed over time, but relatively, the same implicit bias lives within each American individual. Those with power and privilege reshape the understanding of race to align with their goals of oppression. Through each of these many forms, there remains one constant: those with power and privilege control those without.
This exchange is typically mirrored through the relationship between black and white people in America. Dolezal used the privilege of her white skin and white mobility to attempt to change the hundred-year-old definition of race. She violated the struggle for equality black and African Americans fight for. By rejecting her own privilege, she violated us and who we are — or at least who we are trying to be.
While we as black people can identify that Dolezal does not fit the conventional definition of blackness, what is our definition of blackness in America?
The conversation Dolezal began, while was not her intention, did create an environment for an important relation. In attempts to separate from the definition forced upon us, the one Rachel owns, how do we create our own? It was born in suffering, but is that how it must continue? Is it about our skin, our hair, our lips, our nose? Is who we are so shrouded in darkness that we can’t escape the masters our ancestors ran from? Are we still running?
We are. I feel tired. I feel the physical wear and tear of a life spent running. Every day, my lungs burn and my knees buckle; my feet are swollen from years of running from the system, from the police, from them, from myself. Are you prepared to run with us, Rachel? I wonder if she would choose the same path if she realized that every time she takes a piece of blackness for herself, she takes that piece from us. I don’t know if she could keep up. I would like to believe we are running somewhere. Not running away, the feeling Rachel finds community in but running to something.
We are running to freedom. We are running home.
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