Two years ago, Rachel Dolezal was sitting pretty. She was the president of the Spokane NAACP and one of the loudest liberal voices in an area that is largely an extension of deep-red Idaho. But that came unraveled when her white parents revealed that she was a white woman passing as a black woman. As near as I can tell, she did this to rebel against her horribly abusive and borderline cultish childhood in rural Montana.
Within days, she was pushed out as president of the NAACP and as chairwoman of the city police ombudsman commission. Any attempt to rehabilitate herself should have come unstuck a few days later. One of her paintings was revealed to be a carbon copy of “The Slave Ship,” an internationally famous painting by J. M. W. Turner—revealing that the issue wasn’t her ethnicity, but her ethics.
The Guardian recently learned that Dolezal is writing a book about her experiences, “In Full Color,” in an apparent last-ditch effort to stave off total collapse. But if an interview she gave that paper is any indication, she still doesn’t get it.
At Howard she had been introduced to the idea that racial identity was “an invention of human beings”; an arbitrary classification devised by colonial whites to justify their power and privilege. “It’s socially constructed as a world view, and people operate within it, but that also means that it can be reconstructed or deconstructed. And this was a great awakening for me, because it meant I wasn’t forced to own whiteness. It wasn’t like the honest thing to do is say, ‘I’m white’, because race is a social construct. And this gave me this great sense of internal freedom: I wasn’t actually all fucked up. I was actually on to something this whole time.”
Newly divorced, she reached a decision. “For the first time in my life, I really decided consciously to be free from the repression, and free from feeling like I had to do things in a way that was acceptable to other people. I had the courage to be exactly who I was.” From that day on, Dolezal would be unambiguously and publicly black, and remains so to this day.
I get that Dolezal wanted to be free from the repression. But she could have found a much healthier way to find that freedom. Perhaps if she’d gotten some counseling for the abuse she endured, she might have been able to find that outlet. But she didn’t. From where I’m sitting, she poured so much of herself into standing up for others that she forgot to take care of herself.
When this story broke, I initially felt some sympathy for Dolezal. Having been burned by a Christianist cult in college, I can understand how someone who spent her entire life in such an environment wanted to rebel against it. She might have been able to come back from that—with the emphasis on MIGHT—if she’d gotten long-overdue counseling.
But to my mind, any hope of redemption ended with the discovery of her plagiarism. Indeed, she’s very lucky that her cribbing wasn’t unmasked before the news of her race-faking came to light. You can’t chalk that up to an abusive childhood. It is simply beyond belief that someone with a master’s degree in fine arts would not know how serious this is. And apparently she still doesn’t get it—she never mentioned it once in her interview with The Guardian. However, this is as much on The Guardian as it is on Dolezal—had the reporter done her homework, she would have known about the plagiarism.
Dolezal is presently on food stamps, and may very well be homeless by the end of March. She can’t get a job worth getting—the only employers interested in her are reality TV and porn producers. I find it hard to have any sympathy for her. After all, it’s clear that the issue with her isn’t her ethnicity. It’s her ethics. If she doesn’t realize it by now, will she?