Mixed Race Studies

Black like her: Is racial identity a state of mind?

The Washington Post
2015-06-16

Amy Ellis Nutt, Reporter

While people continue to question the motivations behind former NAACP official Rachel Dolezal’s claiming she is black, scientists say identity, even racial identity, doesn’t arise from any single place in the brain.

Individuals contain different selves, often contradictory selves, according to neuroscientists. There is no clump of gray matter or nexus of electrical activity in the brain that we can point to and say, “this is me, this is where my self is located.” Instead, we are spread out over our brain, with different areas of cortex controlling different aspects of who we are, from what we see and hear to how we think and feel.

For instance, the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain located just behind the forehead, is activated whenever we think about ourselves. But when we think about how someone else thinks about us — does my spouse think I’m pretty? — the medial prefrontal cortex disengages and the posterior part lights up. Culture and community, neuroscience tells us is, are important constituents of identity, which may explain why children understand social interactions before they even learn to talk. Identity, in other words, is complicated.

Carolyn Yoon, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, says she doesn’t “see what the big controversy is” regarding Dolezal’s claim to identify as a black person.

“That’s a reasonable view in my book,” Yoon said. “Identity is highly malleable and is a function of what she comes in contact with, what she spends her time doing, is interested in and motivated by. Over time that will change your brain.”…

…There is certainly historical precedence for passing as black. Effa Manley was born to Bertha Brooks, a white woman, in Philadelphia in 1900. Brooks was married to an African-American man and so Effa grew up with six biracial siblings. She, however, was the product of an affair her mother had with a white man. Although blonde-haired, hazel-eyed Effa believed she also was biracial until her teens when her mother told her the truth.

Nonetheless, Effa lived our her life as a black woman: she married an African American, lived in Harlem and became the well-known co-owner of a Negro League baseball team. She also belonged to the NAACP and the Urban League and was once profiled in Ebony magazine.

Whether it was her early life experiences, self-deception or mirror neurons — or all three — Effa Manley saw herself as a black woman, which is why she could muse to a reporter when she was in her 70s, “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to associate with white people.”…

Read the entire article here.

Olbermann Ties Dolezal Race Manipulation to ‘Senseless’ Charleston Shooting

Breitbart News
2015-06-18

Trent Baker, Sports Reporter

On Thursday’s “Olbermann” on ESPN2, host Keith Olbermann opened his show with a monologue speaking about former Spokane NAACP head Rachel Dolezal, deceased American sports executive and the first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame Effa Manley, who was white and identified as black after being raised by her black step-father, and the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which he tied all of them together at the end.

“The Effa Manley story is not about passing, but both lives rise from curiosity and story telling when one remembers that biologists long ago concluded genetically there are no “races” just one species we call human beings. In the stories of both Rachel Dolezal and Effa Manley the importance and meaning we have given to skin pigmentation prove to be amazingly easy to manipulate, proved to be flexible, prove to be impermanent; prove to be remarkably inaccurate, all of which means the madness and nightmare and terrorism that unfolded last night at the church in South Carolina all of that was even more senseless.”…

Read the entire story and watch the video here.

BBC World TV Interview Re Rachel Dolezal & Passing

Marcia Dawkins
2015-06-12

Marcia Dawkins, Assistant Professor of Arts and Humanities
The Minerva Schools at KGI, San Francisco, California

Dr. Dee chatted roadside with BBC World News about the firestorm raging around Rachel Dolezal, the white Spokane, Washington NAACP leader who allegedly passes as black.

Shaun King Is Not Rachel Dolezal: What the Media Gets Wrong About Race in America

For Harriet
2015-08-29

Malaika Jabali

As they have in the past, the conservative truth spinners behind the online media outlet Breitbart News Network have initiated an attack against yet another person of color fighting for civil and human rights. The target this time is activist Shaun King, who has been vocal about the police abuse that has permeated our consciousness for over a year. In likening Shaun King to Rachel Dolezal, the network accused King of lying about being half black in order to receive a “Sons of Oprah” scholarship to attend Morehouse College, a historically Black college and university.

There are some obvious logical deficiencies we could point to as to why BNN needs to have a seat. For starters, few Black people could look at Shaun King and identify him as being a completely white man. Race construction involves a composite of man-made ideas, but phenotype is a key feature among them. Plenty of African-Americans and Black people throughout the Diaspora have light-skinned relatives who look like King. While some may have taken a double take, we accepted his identity and let him do him. Even when Rachel Dolezal’s family revealed that she was lying about her race, many Black Americans were more amused than betrayed and took to Twitter to share in a collective laugh…

…Blackness didn’t originate with my ancestors’ feelings about how they wanted to self-identify. It was created over a period of centuries through very specific, deliberate constructions in European and white American schools of biology, phrenology, philosophy, anthropology, and political and legal systems to uphold the intrinsic superiority of whiteness and corresponding black inferiority…

Read the entire article here.

Before Rachel Dolezal, what did it mean to ‘pass’?

Christian Science Monitor
2015-06-22

Randy Dotinga, President
American Society of Journalists and Authors

Allyson Hobbs, author of ‘A Chosen Exile,’ says the debate stirred up by Rachel Dolezal’s resignation from the NAACP hits historic chords.

Allyson Hobbs, a history professor at Stanford University, remembers hearing a story from her aunt about a distant cousin who grew up on the South Side of Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s.

The cousin was African-American, like Hobbs. But she was light-skinned, “and when she was in high school, her mother wanted her to go to Los Angeles and pass as a white woman,” Hobbs recalls. “Her mother thought this would be the best thing she could do.”

The cousin didn’t want to go but followed her mother’s wishes. She married a white man and had children. About a decade later, Hobbs says, the cousin’s mother contacted her: “You have to come home immediately, your father is dying.”

But it was not to be. “I can’t come home. I’m a white woman now,” the cousin replied. “There’s no turning back. This is the life that you made for me, and the life I have to live now.”

This remarkable tale inspired Hobbs to investigate the long history of blacks passing as whites in her well-received 2014 book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.

The topic of racial passing has filled the airwaves this month amid the controversy over a once-obscure local civil-rights official named Rachel Dolezal. Hobbs adds to the debate this week with New York Times commentary that offers an unexpectedly sympathetic take amid vitriol aimed at Dolezal…

Read the entire interview here.

Why It Was Easy for Rachel Dolezal to Pass as Black

Pacific Standard
2015-06-15

Lisa Wade, Associate Professor of Sociology
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California

Race is more social than biological.

Source: (1)ne Drop Project

Earlier this year a CBS commentator in a panel with Jay Smooth embarrassingly revealed that she thought he was white (Smooth’s father is black) and last week the Internet learned that Rachel Dolezal was white all along (both parents identify as white). The CBS commentator’s mistake and Dolezal’s ability to pass both speak to the strange way we’ve socially constructed blackness in this country.

The truth is that African Americans are essentially all mixed race. From the beginning, enslaved and other Africans had close relationships with poor and indentured servant whites, that’s one reason why so many black people have Irish last names. During slavery, sexual relationships between enslavers and the enslaved, occurring on a range of coercive levels, were routine. Children born to enslaved women from these encounters were identified as “black.” The one-drop rule—you are black if you have one drop of black blood—was an economic tool used to protect the institution of racialized slavery (by preserving the distinction between two increasingly indistinct racial groups) and enrich the individual enslaver (by producing another human being he could own). Those enslaved children grew up and had children with other enslaved people as well as other whites…

Read the entire article here.

When black is white and vice versa

The New Tri-State Defender
Memphis, Tennessee
2015-12-23

Brittney Gathen, Special to The New Tri-State Defender

Dr. Allyson Hobbs signed copies of her book, “A Chosen Exile: AHistory of Racial Passing in American Life,” during an event called “Book Talk” at the National Civil Rights Museum. (Photo: Merritt Gathen)

Stanford professor and author shines light on racial ‘passing’ at NCRM event.

“Passing” – living as a part of one race despite being born into another – is often full of complexity and consequences, so much so that author and Stanford history professor Dr. Allyson Hobbs calls it a type of “exile.”

Hobbs, author of “A Chosen Exile: AHistory of Racial Passing in American Life,”examined the topic of racial passing during “Book Talk” at the National Civil Rights Museum last week (Dec. 17). During the event, Hobbs discussed topics such as the negative side of passing and her perception of former Spokane, Washington NAACP president Rachel Dolezal, who, despite being born white, lived as (and still identifies as) a black woman…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal: ‘I wasn’t identifying as black to upset people. I was being me’

The Guardian
2015-12-13

Chris McGreal, Senior Writer
Guardian US

Rachel Dolezal at her home in Spokane. Photograph: Annie Kuster for the Guardian

She became a global hate figure this year when she was outed as a ‘race faker’. Here, she talks about her puritanical Christian upbringing, the backlash that left her surviving on food stamps – and why she would still do the same again

Anyone looking for clues to the real Rachel Dolezal would do well to begin with her birth certificate. In the bottom right-hand corner, under the names of the parents who brought her world crashing down by outing her as a white woman masquerading as black, is a box for the identity of the medic who delivered her as a baby. In it is written “Jesus Christ”…

Read the entire interview here.

“I wasn’t white! It’s so hard to explain this to people: I don’t feel white.” —Rachel Dolezal

Mitchell Sunderland, “In Rachel Dolezal’s Skin,” Broadly, December 7, 2015. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/rachel-dolezal-profile-interview.

In Rachel Dolezal’s Skin

Broadly
VICE’s Women’s Interest Channel
2015-12-07

Mitchell Sunderland, Managing Editor

Photos by Amy Lombard

In an exclusive interview, Rachel Dolezal discusses growing up on a Christian homestead, painting her face different colors as a child, and why she’s naming her new baby after Langston Hughes.

On a gloomy Saturday night in Spokane, WA, roughly a dozen people gather in the penthouse suite of the Davenport Grand Hotel for Rachel Dolezal’s baby shower. Hip-hop and jazz play on a flat-screen TV, and paper yellow duckies hang on the silver walls. While Rachel’s 21-year-old adopted son Izaiah pops a bottle of champagne, Rachel’s friends—her ex-boyfriend Charles Miller and several women—eat croissant sandwiches on disposable plastic plates. The women vary in age and race (there’s nearly an equal number of black and white guests), but when I ask them how they know Rachel, most give the same answer: “She does my hair.”

Rachel does her own hair, too. Today, she wears a black weave. “In the winter I like to have [a weave] because you don’t have to wear a hat,” she explains. “In the summer I like to wear braids and dreads—that’s just me.” The women’s conversations, though, aren’t about hair and instead revolve around the baby. An hour into the party, Rachel’s friend passes out pieces of paper for a “baby pool.” She asks the partygoers to predict the baby’s “weight, birthday, and gender.” There’s not an option for race. It’s undoubtedly a sensitive topic in this room, but no less a loaded one. After all, much of Rachel’s story is hinged on the concept that, like gender, race is a social construct…

Read the entire interview here.