Mixed Race Studies

It’s Impossible to Lie About Your Race

The Huffington Post
2015-07-01

Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
New York University

There’s an important question being left out of the furor over charges that Rachel Dolezal, the former head of the NAACP’s Spokane chapter, has been “lying” about her race: How can you lie about something that doesn’t have any objective truth to it in the first place?

The frenzy over Dolezal has erupted because her claim to black identity defies a longstanding American belief that human beings come in three or four or five flavors called “races,” which are linked to the geographical areas from which our ancestors came, and which are characterized by physical characteristics that are passed down from one generation to the next. According to this dominant view, Dolezal is objectively white because her parents are white Americans whose recent ancestors were from Europe.

But instead of being a matter of natural, objective facts, race is more like astrology. It’s a way of dividing human beings up into different categories, and we are the ones who invent those categories, not Mother Nature. The idea that there are “black” people and “white” people is no different than the belief that there are Geminis and Scorpios. Indeed, astrology and racial classification both claim to be grounded in nature. Race ostensibly reflects our biological constitution, while sun signs are meant to capture planetary forces that imprinted us at birth. But it’s not too hard to see that a whole lot of human cultural thinking has gone into both. The reality is that scientists are far from any agreement on what race has to do with genes. And the racial classifications so familiar to Americans today are actually products of the 1700s, when they were forged by Europeans who were trying to explain the physical, social and moral qualities of peoples they had come to colonize across the world.

So when Rachel Dolezal says she is black when we consider her white, it’s akin to her claiming to be a Virgo when by our lights she’s a Leo. Would it really be a lie to say you’re a Virgo instead of a Leo when both of those categories are made up in the first place?…

Read the entire article here.

Cosmopolitanism, Black Culture and the Case of Rachel Dolezal

Rooted In Magazine
2015-06-16

Annina Chirade

In this past week the internet has been captivated by the unfolding tale of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who reportedly has been passing for black since 2007. She was, until recently, the President of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington and a very vocal proponent of black issues within that community. Her construction of a ‘black’ identity is both intricate and mystifying, it’s a deceit that forces us to ask – how did no one know she was white? Rachel’s performance of black womanhood has thrust global scrutiny onto debates about the constructions of blackness. In the book ‘The Conservation of Races’, W.E.B. Du Bois argues that race is a ‘socio-historical construct’: a construct defined as much by the emotional, spiritual and psychological, as it is by the societal. The historical context comes from inheritance of a struggle, black culture has been defined by its resistance – a place where we can explore and celebrate our complexity. The resistance is also coupled with a struggle for autonomy, and as black culture is continually absorbed into popular culture, one must ask: Is Rachel a signal for what’s to come?…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal’s True Lies

Vanity Fair
2015-07-19

Allison Samuels

Justin Bishop, Photography

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

For a time this summer, it seemed all anyone could talk about was the N.A.A.C.P. chapter president whose parents had “outed” her as white. The tornado of public attention has since moved on, but Rachel Dolezal still has to live with her choices—and still refuses to back down.

It’s safe to say that Rachel Dolezal never thought much about the endgame. You can see it on her face in the local-TV news video—the one so potently viral it transformed her from regional curiosity to global punch line in the span of 48 hours in mid-June. It is precisely the look of a white woman who tanned for a darker hue, who showcased a constant rotation of elaborately designed African American hairstyles, and who otherwise lived her life as a black woman, being asked if she is indeed African American.

It is the look of a cover blown…

Read the entire interview here.

Faking Black identity: An American tradition

The New Pittsburgh Courier
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
2015-06-27

Robert Fikes Jr., Reference Librarian
San Diego State University, San Diego, California

The recent case of Rachel Dolezal, the White woman who reinvented herself as African American and headed the Spokane, Washington NAACP, is just the latest sensationalized instance of “passing.”  Though reports of Black and mixed-race individuals pretending to be White far outnumber reports of Whites masquerading as Black, curiously, this rare but persistent case has attracted considerable attention.

In the 1800s there were documented cases involving poor Whites kidnapped, declared mulatto, and sold into slavery. In the 1900s the typical scenario presented Whites as intimate partners of Blacks or Whites who lived among them and found it convenient to either manufacture Black ancestry or did nothing to rectify the misconception folks had that they were part Black. A well-researched example, detailed in the acclaimed biography Passing Strange in 2009 by Martha Sandweiss, is that of blue-eyed Clarence King who in the late 1800s was a renowned white scientist by day but by evening resumed his fake identity as James Todd, a Black Pullman porter who lived with his Black wife and their two biracial children in Brooklyn, New York.

More widely publicized was journalist John Howard Griffin who in the late 1950s managed to darken his skin sufficiently to pass as Black in order to report on the ordinary treatment of Blacks in the Deep South.  His experiences resulted in the both a bestselling book and movie of the same title:  John Howard Griffin “Black Like Me.”…

Read the entire article here.

This identity and social experience is part of what [Rachel] Dolezal is denounced for having inauthentically appropriated. Unfortunately, it’s a darn sight messier and more complicated than that. For after all, blackness, responding to the dominant society’s definition and control of boundaries was in part defined by its opposition to the cultural construct of whiteness, and vice versa, whiteness was created in opposition and on the basis of the privileges generated by dividing our country into dominant and subordinate races.

Richard Kaplan, “Dolezal and the Defense of the Community,” Public Seminar, July 9, 2015. http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/07/dolezal-and-the-defense-of-the-community.

Dolezal and the Defense of the Community

Public Seminar
2015-07-09

Richard Kaplan

Reflections on the unique difficulties of passing from white to black in America

It strikes me that an incredible amount of media attention and denunciation has focused on a poor, perhaps deluded woman in Spokane, Washington. Rachel Dolezal’s crime was to lie and try and pass as black. While the media have seen fit to celebrate Caitlyn Jenner and her exceedingly forthright bursting of the boundaries dividing male from female, in the Dolezal case, commentators seem intent on reinforcing the walls dividing black from white, creating an effective DMZ one cannot pass. Perhaps Dolezal failed to pay the adequate dues and penance in trespassing the racial boundaries — unlike Jenner she didn’t lay under the bright lights of the surgery chamber and submit to the cuts of the surgeon’s scalpel nor withstand the prolonged glare of prior media dissection.

Nevertheless, it’s remarkable how much media commentary seems to revolve around reinforcing the racial boundary. All the more strange since every commentator at the same time is obliged to note that race has no biological underpinnings but is culturally constructed, as evidenced by the uniquely American rule of racial classification of “one drop.” Unlike the seemingly more biologically based binary of gender, indeed, we should recognize that America’s bizarre rule, where even slightest trace of “African” blood confines you in the black camp, is what allowed the very white Dolezal to pass as a very light-skinned black…

Read the entire article here.

Historian Allyson Hobbs on the History of Racial Passing

The 7th Avenue Project: Thinking Persons’ Radio
2015-06-28

Robert Pollie, Host, Creator and Producer

The recent case of Rachel Dolezal – the “black” activist outed as white – may have seemed novel, but she’s actually part of an old tradition of racial passing in this country. How long has passing been going on and how has it changed over the years? What’s it tell us about racial categories and color lines? Why are we so fascinated with passing stories? I spoke with historian Allyson Hobbs about her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.

Download the interview (01:11:05) here.

From ‘blood quantum’ to multiracial bill of rights, Dolezal saga ignites talk of identity

The Seattle Times
2015-06-17

Nina Shapiro, Seattle Times staff reporter

The endless fascination with the Rachel Dolezal story reveals our hunger to talk about racial identity in all its complexity.

When Amanda Erekson was in her early 20s, a friend introduced her to a Japanese-American woman at a party. “Amanda is Japanese-American, too!” her friend enthused.

“The person was shocked,” Erekson recalls. “I know white people who look more Japanese than you,” the woman said.

The comment stung. Erekson, who is multiracial, identifies strongly with her Japanese-American heritage, although her appearance leads most people to assume she is simply white.

This kind of skeptical reaction is one reason the 33-year-old New Yorker, president of MAVIN, an organization devoted to the multiracial experience, bemoans the international media sensation that is Rachel Dolezal. Because of the former Spokane NAACP president, who resigned from her post Monday after her parents said she had been posing as black, Erekson says “it will be that much harder” for people like her…

…Race — or more specifically racial identity — has been Topic A in the national conversation over the past week. And it is one of the most nuanced and interesting conversations we’ve ever had.

People obviously have a deep need to talk about the subject, and to talk about it in complex ways, says New Jersey filmmaker Lacey Schwartz. She saw that same need in the outpouring of personal stories sparked by the making of her recent film “Little White Lie,” a documentary about growing up in a Jewish family and discovering in college that her biological father is African American…

To some extent, the current conversation involves picking apart details of the Dolezal saga, which seems to get stranger by the day.

Witness Dolezal’s assertion Tuesday, despite a birth certificate produced by Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal, that there’s no proof that the couple are her biological parents. She evinced a similar squishiness on NBC’s “Today” show earlier in the day when she said that she “identified” as black.

Whatever story she has that prompts such a statement, she’s not “owning it’ by honestly talking about it, Schwartz says. The filmmaker also objects to Dolezal’s declaration on “Today” that she needed to present herself as black because otherwise it wouldn’t be “plausible” to assume guardianship, as she did, of one of her adopted African-American brothers.

“That is a real diss,” Schwartz says. “My mother is white. I know lots of white people raising children of color.”

Yet, Camille Gear Rich, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Southern California, points out that parents who look different from their children often face incredulous questions. That intrusiveness might have pushed her into “going too far” by lying about her race, Rich says…

…Backlash

Yet this insistence on racial labeling faces a backlash.

MAVIN arose in 1998 in response to a growing desire by multiracial people to identify themselves in ways that might differ from how they are perceived. The group looks to a landmark “bill of rights for people of mixed heritage” produced by Seattle psychologist Maria P.P. Root.

Some key passages: “I have the right … To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify. To identify myself differently than how my parents identify me. To identify myself differently than my brothers and sisters. To identify myself differently in different situations.” Also: “I have the right … To change my identity over my lifetime — and more than once.”…

Read the entire article here.

“There is an important difference between identity and identification, which Karen and I have talked about in our book Racecraft. Rachel Dolezal was able to define her identity well enough to become what she said she was in her environment, in Spokane. And that’s something available to her partly because of the way that we as a society define who is black and who is not.

Anybody can be black — black is defined as any known or visible ancestry — or “one drop of blood.” So it’s really not based on what you look like, even if you go to the trouble of tanning and wearing a wig and whatnot.

Most Afro Americans don’t have any control over identification. Their identity, how they define themselves, how they perceive themselves, can be overruled by that identification. That’s what happens when we see Afro-American police officers killed by their comrades by mistake. Their identity as a police officer is overruled instantly and fatally because the identification takes precedence.

That’s what happens to people who are visibly Afro American or who are identified that way in our racist society, if not always in so dramatic and terminal a way. Mistaken identification can put an end to one’s identity by terminating the human being it’s attached to.” —Barbara J. Fields

Jason Farbman, “How Race Is Conjured,” Jacobin, (June 29, 2015). https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/karen-barbara-fields-racecraft-dolezal-racism/.

The weird, strange narrative of Rachel Dolezal

The Remix
WHYY-FM Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2015-06-17

James Peterson, Host

What determines your race? Is it about genetics or cultural identification? The curious case of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who has been passing for black, has been met with surprise, outrage and confusion. Dolezal, former president of the Spokane NAACP, says she has self-identified as black from an early age, even though she was born to and raised by two white parents. Her comments have launched another contentious debate about the definition of race and racial identity in America. Joining us to talk about it all are Donald Tibbs and James Peterson. Tibbs teaches Law at Drexel University. Peterson is Director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University and host of WHYY’s podcast “The Remix.”

Listen to the interview (00:13:44) here.