Jelani Cobb, writing in the New Yorker, has the smartest take I’ve seen so far on what Rachel Dolezal was doing.
The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie. …JelaniCobb,NewYorker
Then there is something else. Are whites similar to each other — I mean in ways other than skin color (which itself varies from freckly pinkish white to olive)? No. Are all blacks pretty much the same? Hell, no.
And just how kosher is the notion that President Obama — who is, after all, pretty much 50/50 — a “black” president? We figured that out yet?
Jelani Cobb, who identifies as “black,” is really a …. what? After all, he has white ancestors.
Nearly all of us who identify as African-American in this country, apart from some more recent immigrants, have at least some white ancestry. My own white great-grandparent is as inconsequential as the color of my palms in terms of my status as a black person in the United States. My grandparents had four children: my father and his brother, both almond-brown, with black hair and dark eyes, and two girls with reddish hair, fair skin, freckles, and gray eyes. All of them were equally black because they were equal heirs to the quirks of chance determining whether their ancestry from Europe or Africa was most apparent. …JelaniCobb,NewYorker
And this is something to think about:
Dolezal’s primary offense lies not in the silly proffering of a false biography but in knowing this ugly history and taking advantage of the reasons that she would, at least among black people, be taken at her word regarding her identity. ...JelaniCobb,NewYorker
Kind of like a blogger.
I’d like to hear more from and about us tweenies. We are people, black or white, who agree with Cobb — stand up and applaud Cobb — when he says “Rachel Dolezal is not black—by lineage or lifelong experience—yet I find her deceptions less troubling than the vexed criteria being used to exclude her.”
Exactly. And there’s a whole bunch of us of all shades of color out here who suffer from constant vexation with the color issue.
If blackness is simply a matter of a preponderance of African ancestry, then we should set about the task of excising a great deal of the canon of black history, up to and including the current President. If it is simply a matter of shared experience, we might excommunicate people like Walter White, whose blue eyes were camouflage that could serve both to spare him the direct indignity of racism and enable him to personally investigate and expose lynchings. Dolezal was dishonest about an undertaking rooted in dishonesty, and no matter how absurd her fictional blackness may appear, it is worth recalling that the former lie is far more dangerous than the latter. ...JelaniCobb,NewYorker