Mixed Race Studies

Rachel Dolezal isn’t alone – my family history proves choosing a racial definition is hard

The Guardian
Monday, 2015-06-15

Bliss Broyard

Bliss Broyard’s father kept his black roots a secret his whole life. Her journey of self-discovery led her to the understanding that believing the results of a DNA cheek swab to be more meaningful than one’s experiences is a ridiculous notion

How do you determine who is black? Is it simply a matter of inheritance – you are what your parents are? Does having a black grandparent make a person black? Must she have been raised as black, in a black community? Is one black ancestor, one drop of blood, enough?

These were the kinds of questions asked during the legal trials undertaken in the late 19th and early 20th century throughout southern and midwestern US states, to determine a person’s “true” racial identity. Then, as now, ancestry trumped lived experience. In Ohio the courts ruled that having 50% black ancestry, a single black parent or two mixed parents, made a person black – and hence socially and politically inferior – while in Louisiana, the “one drop” rule prevailed, and any traceable amount of Negro ancestry denied one certain legal rights, including the right to vote and the right to marry a person of another race…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal’s ‘Passing’ Isn’t So Unusual

The New York Times Magazine
2015-06-15

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennesee

Daniel J. Sharfstein is the author of “The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America.”

Why do we care so much about Rachel Dolezal, the head of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. who apparently misrepresented herself as African-American when, according to her parents, she is Czech, Swedish and German, with some remote Native American ancestry?

In one sense, it’s not at all surprising. Stories of white Americans “passing” as members of other racial and ethnic groups have often captivated the American public — though the cases that have most fascinated us have usually turned on the malicious hypocrisy of the protagonists. In 1965, The Times famously reported that Dan Burros, the Ku Klux Klan’s Grand Dragon in New York State and the former national secretary of the American Nazi Party, was once a Jew who not only was a “star” bar mitzvah student at his shul in Queens but also brought knishes to white-supremacist gatherings. In 1991, an Emory University professor drew headlines by unmasking Forrest Carter, the author of a best-selling Native American “memoir,” as Asa Earl Carter, an Alabama Klansman and a speechwriter for George Wallace, the state’s segregationist governor.

But nowhere in the details that reporters and Internet sleuths have uncovered about Dolezal is there any inkling of personal commitment to white supremacy; her work with the N.A.A.C.P., now finished, and as a professor of Africana studies suggests quite the opposite. Her story spins at a far lower orbit of oddity than the trajectories of Burros and Carter, yet she is attracting a similar level of attention. More puzzling still, her case has gone viral at a moment when we are learning that Rachel Dolezals have been much more common in this country’s history than we once might have thought…

Read the entire article here.

Join in the #LittleWhiteLie Twitter Chat with Filmmaker @laceyschwartz & More!

#LittleWhiteLie, @lwlfilm
2015-06-16, 20:00 EDT (2015-06-17, 00:00Z)

An online discussion on Race, Identity and “Little White Lies”

Lacey Schwartz, Filmmaker (Little White Lie)
Brooklyn, New York

Yaba Blay, Author and Professor
(1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

Collier Meyerson, Race & Politics Reporter
Fusion

Michelle Materre, Filmmaker and Professor
The New School, New York, New York

Jamil Smith, Senior Editor
The New Republic

For more information, click here.

Before Rachel Dolezal, there was Walter White

The Christian Science Monitor
2015-06-15

Randy Dotinga

The man known as ‘Mr. NAACP’ was blonde, blue-eyed and 5/32nd black, all of which provoked an outcry similar to that over contemporary NAACP official Rachel Dolezal.

Walter White, known as “Mr. NAACP,” didn’t look black. He had blue eyes and blonde hair, and his enemies sought to smear him as an opportunist who lied about his race and couldn’t possibly understand the black experience. But the secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People persevered through much of the 20th century and left a stunning if tarnished legacy.

White energized the refined halls of the NAACP, brought together literary stars of the Harlem Renaissance, and helped craft the partial demise of segregation. He battled lynching, convinced politicians to kill the Supreme Court nomination of a racist and hobnobbed with the famous. Sixty years after his death, White is eclipsed in modern memory by other civil-rights leaders. Few know about his remarkable struggle to be seen as the genuine article by other African-Americans, and his vicious battles with fellow leaders like W. E. B. DuBois.

But this month, the ever-bubbling issue of blackness – who has it, who doesn’t, and why it matters – is on tongues across the country amid the roaring debate over Rachel Dolezal, a NAACP official in Spokane, Wash. White’s story resonates as Dolezal, who may not be black as she’s claimed, faces a national storm.

Here are 5 Things to Know about Walter White and Racial Identity, gleaned from his crisply written 1948 memoir A Man Called White and author Thomas Dyja’s perceptive and often-critical 2008 biography Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America…

Read the entire article here.

White Womanhood Revised

Avidly: A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel
2015-06-15

Brigitte Fielder, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Whatever else we might say about it, let’s not forget this: Rachel Dolezal’s story is a decidedly American one. Here, I refer not only to story of Dolezal’s racial passing, but also to how Dolezal’s story triggers and reveals America’s racial fascinations. Whatever Dolezal’s motives or ethics, our scrutiny of Dolezal’s race echoes a long history of parsing race in the United States more generally.

Much of the conversation about Dolezal proceeds within long-standing US assumptions about how race “works”: if her biological parents are “really” white people, then so is she, and therefore she cannot be black. While Dolezal is a member of an interracial family, she seems to have no mixed-race African American genealogy, and this is the single deciding factor about her own race. In effect, these assumptions tell us that there is no way for a woman who was born white (i.e., to white parents) to become black. For her to claim blackness, then, is a conscious act of deception.

But for all the clarity these assumptions provide, they are not the only American story about race and womanhood. Even as Americans want race to be simple and essentialist, American racial ideologies rarely allows it to be. Race, Dolezal’s story reminds us, is connected to the history of racial justice work and interracial collaboration, and complicated by relations of power and privilege. Her story also reminds us how race is connected to not only biological relationships, but also to social relationships. For a scholar of race and nineteenth-century literature like myself, Dolezal’s complex (and confusing) story calls to mind other stories of white womanhood revised.

Consider how Dolezal’s American Story aligns with this fictional one: Kate Chopin’s 1893 short story, “Désirée’s Baby.” In the story, Désirée, a woman of unknown parentage, is adopted into a respectable white family and marries the wealthy son of slaveholders, Armand Aubigny. When Désirée and Armand’’s baby begins to show signs of being mixed-race, Armand argues that, because the baby does not look white, it is not white. The appearance of Désirée’s baby calls Désirée’s race into question…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal and the ‘politics of passing’

Melissa Harris-Perry
2015-06-13

Melissa Harris-Perry talks with Allyson Hobbs, the woman who literally wrote the book about passing as another race in America, about the Rachel Dolezal story and how people have responded.

Watch the interview (00:07:43) here.

‘Are you African-American?’

All In With Chris Hayes
MSNBC
2015-06-12

Chris Hayes, Host

Lacey Schwartz, a film-maker who grew up in a white family then discovered that her biological father was black, shares her unique perspective on Rachel Dolezal, the head of the Spokane NAACP whose estranged parents claim is misrepresenting herself as black.

Watch the interview (00:09:19) here.

Passing in reverse: What does an NAACP leader’s case say about race?

The Washington Post
2015-06-12

Krissah Thompson, Staff Writer

Passing in this country has usually operated in one direction: black skin passing for white, marginalization traded for privilege, the burden of the minority cast off.

Until now. Enter Rachel Dolezal, 37, the head of the NAACP in Spokane, Wash., who seized headlines and set social media afire this week when relatives claimed that she is a white woman who has been passing as African American.

Her story was a head-scratcher for many, raising questions about the determination to self-identify when it comes to race. Is “passing in reverse” a thing? And what does Dolezal’s supposed decision say about being white in modern America? Was whiteness the weight she cast off?

“In this society, people would prefer to be identified with the race that is least stigmatized,” says Derald Wing Sue, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, where he has studied racial identity. “It baffles everyone when it goes the other way.”

But it does not surprise Sue, who has studied the ways white Americans become sensitive to racial dynamics…

…Take, for example, Walter White, born in 1893. Blue-eyed and blond-haired with fair skin, the product of Atlanta’s black community had more white ancestors than black, according to some accounts. And he saw himself as black, although he passed as white to enable his travels through the South investigating lynchings and hate crimes. Later in life, he married a white woman and was forced to defend himself against accusations that he was white passing as black — all while serving as the national head of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955.

Read the entire article here.

Whites pass for black to gain empathy, experts say in wake of Dolezal case

USA Today
2015-06-13

Melanie Eversley, Breaking News Reporter

In history and in many black American families, there’s talk of black people passing for white, especially during the days of Jim Crow laws or slavery when it benefited them or even saved their lives.

But not as much has been written about the white people who pass for black or adopt black culture — from celebrities who adopt traditionally black hairstyles and vernacular, or, as social media has been abuzz with since Thursday, Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP Spokane, Wash., branch president whose parents say she is white.

English professor Alisha Gaines, who is publishing a book about white people who pass for black, says the phenomenon is rooted in a need to identify and empathize with black culture. Some people throughout history have passed for black as a way to immerse themselves in the experience, says Gaines, who teaches at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

One of the people referenced in her book, Black for a Day: Fantasies of Race and Empathy, is Grace Halsell, a late journalist who posed as a black woman for a few weeks in the deep South and wrote about her experiences in a book titled Soul Sister…

…The main reason people choose to pass for black is they have a need or desire to promote civil rights and racial justice, says Marcia Dawkins, author of Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity…

…Author and educator Nikki Khanna believes it also can be about being accepted.

“Maybe for this particular woman — it seems as if she cares about African-American issues, she heads the chapter of the NAACP in Spokane, I don’t know if she felt that was her way of fitting in,” says Khanna, who has studied how biracial Americans identify in terms of race…

Read the entire article here.

N.A.A.C.P. Leader Rachel Dolezal Posed as Black, Parents Say

The New York Times
2015-06-12

Daniel Victor

The parents of a civil rights activist in Spokane, Wash., say their daughter has misrepresented herself as black for years, spurring a growing discussion on social media about race and identity.

Rachel Dolezal, 37, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Spokane and a part-time professor in the Africana Studies program at Eastern Washington University, has said on at least one application that she is black, as well as white and Native American.

Members of civil rights organizations in the Spokane area say Ms. Dolezal has claimed that she is part African-American. Claims that she received hate mail in late February and March generated much local media coverage and more than a little skepticism.

Read the entire article here.