The Dolezal Disappointment: A new documentary fails to contribute to discussions of identity; perhaps the problem is its subject
This essay is, by modern standards, wholly problematic. I believe that future readers won’t see it as so, but I don’t deny that it is steeped in white (and educated and male) privilege. I don’t think there is any way for it to not be; the most oppressive social systems are often inescapable. Even my ability to point this out, while knowing full-well that it doesn’t absolve my participation in the system is, of course, indicative of it. If any of this is exhausting to you, I can’t imagine you’d care to read about Rachel Dolezal anyway.
Because this is in some ways a film review, I should say that The Rachel Divide, the Netflix-produced Rachel Dolezal documentary by director Laura Brownson, is disappointing on many levels. I’m disappointed in Dolezal for refusing to engage in any deeper self-examination than she has thus far in her public life. I’m disappointed in Brownson for wasting so much footage on the same circular narrative and for not asserting her own point of view when it became clear that Dolezal wouldn’t be providing much of one. I’m disappointed in Netflix for funding, releasing, and promoting a film that adds little to the story of its subject, much less to the dialogue around transracial identity. Mostly, though, I’m disappointed in myself for continuing to follow Dolezal’s journey, for allowing her to carry any of my hope for post-identity politics, for holding deep interest in something that, quite frankly, is not my concern.
But then, whose concern is identity? “There’s no disagreement that, ultimately, black people govern blackness,” says Brownson to Dolezal. This comment comes an hour and thirty-five minutes into an hour-and-forty-five minute documentary. It should have served as the starting point for a better one. To give Brownson the benefit of the doubt, it’s entirely possible this is where her conversation with Dolezal started and it simply didn’t progress enough (judging by Dolezal’s reaction to the statement, it likely didn’t progress at all) to build the film around it. But why make the film at all if not to interrogate the very thing that keeps Dolezal relevant: the nature of identity.
The most obvious, recent, and relevant precedent offering a lens through which to consider identity is that of gender. The documentary dances around this, presenting a few such arguments using this frame, but always as part of a montage, always through a third-party. The film itself presents (to me, at least) as slightly in the “that’s not the same thing” camp, and it’s disheartening that the most lucid presentation of the analogical argument comes from Harvey Levin, the oft-unscrupulous TMZ-founder.
Levin uses the example of Caitlyn Jenner to point out the potential hypocrisy a guest on his television show is displaying in attacking Dolezal for saying that she identifies as black. Though I’m loathe to align myself intellectually with Levin (who is not the first to point out this line of reasoning; Susan Stryker, a notable theorist in gender and sexuality studies used a similar argument in calling for more conversation around this issue), his argument does feel totally obvious. To me. A white person. Swap out the race language Dolezal’s fiercest critics use with gender language, and many of those statements would scan as hate speech.
This is not to say that it is hate speech, but rather to point out that the social standards are clearly different when it comes to transracial identity. We are at a point in history where a wealthy white man can say that they’ve always identified as female and society has (largely, though far from fully) accepted this. A white woman saying that she’s always identified as black gets no such grace. There may be very valid reasons for the difference, and certainly some of the other voices in The Rachel Divide try to articulate them, but most of the arguments seem to be more about integrity (lying) than identity (believing).
Dolezal, to her credit or to her endless desire for attention, continually shows up for her whipping. She goes on The Real, a BET talk show where the hosts prod her into saying that she was born to white parents and poke fun at her unborn child’s race. She attends academic discussions where Q&A’s quickly devolve into attack sessions. Perhaps most troubling, she continues to be active on social media and, at least on film, reads comment after hateful comment left on her Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. When asked why she continues to use social media, Dolezal says, it’s “the only way that I have a presence in the world right now. It’s the only thing I have control over.”
While Dolezal has an overt persecution complex — the documentary heavily implies that she has and continues to fabricate hate crimes committed against her — it’s not clear what she gains from this behavior at this point in her journey. Her own son, Franklin, perhaps the most empathetic and authentic person portrayed in the film, speculates on what number of those alleged hate crimes may actually be real and then voices the most reasonable take of anyone close to Dolezal: some of it may be true, but she doesn’t make it any easier on herself through her public appearances and persona.
It must be stated, as uncomfortable as it makes me to do so, that a persecution complex may indeed be considered part of identity when the identity in question is a marginalized one. It would not be fair, however, to say that many black Americans have such a complex, or that feeling persecuted is central to a “normative” black identity, were such a thing definable.
This is, I think, the crux of the Dolezal problem: Dolezal seemingly has internal distress about the “realness” of her black identity, and she (rightly) fears that others don’t believe her and so she (perhaps consciously, but maybe not) performs this hate herself as a way to lessen the impact it has coming from others.
Indeed, the performative aspect of Dolezal’s blackness seems to be the thing upon which one’s acceptance or rejection of her transracial identity hinges. “Her blackness is a performance, and our transness is our identity,” says Lourdes Ashley Hunter, National Director for the Trans Women of Color Collective. Kitara Johnson, a member of the Spokane NAACP, of which Dolezal was president before her “outing,” comments that, “Transracial is the epitome of white privilege.” Johnson goes on to critique Dolezal’s attempts to look black, going so far as to say that she feels Dolezal was (is) playing the character of being black.
These are views I do not fully understand. Isn’t all identity performative? Who among us isn’t playing a character? There is nothing inherent to humanity that would suggest clothing preferences, hairstyles, and makeup choices, to say nothing of nationality, race, sexual orientation. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most of our individual identities are chaotic jumbles of social constructs. Nor do I think this is a problem — one of the primary purposes to have an identity at all is do so in relation to one’s society, so it stands to reason that those identities would of course be socially constructed.
Since we are still socially deconstructing the concept of race in this country, a work that seems likely to take generations longer than it will to further deconstruct sexual orientation and gender norms, we may not be ready to accept certain performances of race, no matter how closely they hew to an individual’s deeply felt identity.
Indeed, when Johnson expresses her frustration with Dolezal being heralded for social justice work in a way that darker-skinned women in the movement were not, she isn’t attacking Dolezal’s identity, per se; instead, she’s pointing out that Dolezal’s whiteness gives Dolezal an access and a privilege that is not afforded to many black women. Dolezal’s inability to accept or even see this reality may not negate her black identity, but it does place her in a very small group of black-identified individuals who actively benefit from white privilege. In this way, it’s much easier to understand how Dolezal’s oft-flippant dismissal of challenges to her racial identity might offend, frustrate, and anger black Americans.
The Rachel Divide opens with Dolezal saying, “I know who I am, and my kids know who I am, and pretty much, I don’t think anyone else knows me…totally.” The documentary tries to make the case that those claims are false, true, and false, respectively. Instead, it’s clear that Dolezal has perhaps the most fixed identity, even if it is one that her kids struggle with and that most everyone else rejects. This identity, though, is hard to easily parse through all of Dolezal’s (likely) manipulations and insistence on being a public figure who is seen and accepted as black.
These complications are why Dolezal is a poor avatar for discussing transracial identity. There is a conversation to be had here, a chance to further what has been an academic hypothetical into a mainstream consideration, but Dolezal is too messy a canvas upon which to paint new pictures. Perhaps The Rachel Divide couldn’t engage this conversation for just that reason, or perhaps Brownson truly wanted to tell Dolezal’s story rather than explore a substantial social issue, or perhaps Netflix didn’t want to engage in something that could be met with inflammatory reception if it gave voice to alternative (and potentially dangerous) arguments on the nature of identity.
More likely, though, is that I wanted something out of the The Rachel Divide that would serve me as a white intellectual: new ways of thinking about identity which would confirm my lived reality of…not really having to think about my identity. Again, this is privilege on my part. But the primary way I know how to undo and lessen that privilege is to listen to those for whom thinking about identity is a daily burden. There are a few voices in The Rachel Divide that may be up for the task; unfortunately, Dolezal is not among them.
