So many of my notifications on all forms of social media this morning are talking about this woman:

Rachel Dolezal, head of an NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, has been posing as a Black woman for years and her whitewhitewhite parents put her on Front Street yesterday.  

The first thing I did when I saw the notifications was open up some links to read about what happened and on every single article, this showed up:

Over and over and over again

Those comments are from Buzzfeed, but they’re everywhere, and largely being made by cisgender white people.  The opinion I really want is from a Black trans person, not Becky from North Platte, Nebraska who has no frame of reference for either of those groups.

Until Janet Mock or Laverne Cox gives me something to work with, I want to attempt to explain that while race and gender are both social constructs, they don’t occupy the same space with regard to perception or flexibility.

Rachel Dolzeal is white and she’s been white since the day she was born.

Her parents say she is a mixture of Czech, German, and Swedish, which is to say Rachel is White, Whiter, and Whitest.  At some point in her life she decided to just BECOME Black.

For people saying Rachel never actually lied about being white or never stated she was Black, don’t be simple.  She knew exactly what she was doing, talmbout her “natural” hair which is obviously a perm, taking her dreadlocks out, leading the public to believe her adopted younger brother is her son, posting pics with this random Black man and commenting about her father, etc.  Rachel wanted to be Black because she felt an overwhelming need for attention, because she felt an affinity for Black culture, or because she supports Black politics but was dismissed as a white woman, or possibly a combination of all three.  Rachel didn’t want to be Black because she *felt* Black, because Black is not a feeling.  Black is an existence that was created for us by racists as a tool to justify ill-treatment and codify oppression into law.  

The concept of race as we understand it today developed as an extension of colonialism in tandem with the scientific revolution, where science was used to definitively classify people, rank them along variables such as beauty and intelligence, and solidify whiteness as the ideal in each category.  The scientific community “objectively” placing white people at the top was a way to justify the maltreatment of non-white people further down the list, because white is the pinnacle of humanity and the further you differentiate away from that, the closer you are to beasts.  That is where race comes from.  Race isn’t even 400 years old and it’s a flexible standard by which to judge people.  

White people are white.  Period.  Any tainting of that whiteness means you are no longer white, and if the physical expression of that tainting is clearly evident, you are perceived as non-white by a societal structure created by white people to keep themselves at the top.  Rachel was able to fool people into thinking she was Black because she made enough cosmetic changes to make herself appear non-white.  Her act only works because white is 100% white.  Anything less and you can claim minority status because you are not pure and you have been tainted.  Obama is 50% white and could never be perceived as a white man, while Wentworth miller is (at most) 25% Black and used his race as an explanation of a racially charged cartoon he drew while at Princeton.  Race and the perception of race is based on the need to keep white people at the top.

Gender is a performance wrongfully based on what your body does and how you should behave accordingly.  For most of human history, sex and gender have been interchangeable.  Gender roles developed because male bodies look like this and female bodies look like that.  The male body is stronger, so he should hunt.  The female body gives birth, so she should stay close to home to care for the children.  This was the basis of gender for tens of thousands of years, however, humanity develops.  We are not the same kind of people we were 10,000 years ago.  Sex is something assigned to you by a  doctor at birth based on what’s between your legs.  It’s an imperfect classification not only because gender develops later but also because doctors frequently get it “wrong” when  infant genitals do not meet expectations and they are altered incorrectly.  Gender is an expression of an inner self’s need to perform, present, and be perceived as male or female.

Like race, gender expression is highly variable.  Society says Men Look/Behave This Way and Women Are The Opposite, though a lot of us blur those lines and perform gender in a way that fits us personally.  The difference between perception of race and perception of gender is, Random White Man can perform his gender as 25% female and still identify as male.  He cannot be 25% Black and still identify as white.  (You can’t be 25% female, I’m just drawing a comparison.)  For example, my physical self-expression naturally tends toward blurring gender lines.  I have long hair and I’ll throw on a dress if the mood suits me.  Those behaviors are typically associated with women, but I am still a man and I still perform my gender as a man because that is who I am inside and who I want to be perceived as by society.  

One last strike against anyone claiming to be transracial:  It only works one way.  Only white people can claim to be another race on the inside and then “perform” that race because race operates with white as the default.  Racial classifications are based on deviations FROM whiteness.  Rachel could pay a Black woman to do her hair and then pick up some NARS bronzer and say “Look!  I’m not white!”  I can’t straighten my hair and put chalk on my face while saying “Look!  I’m not Black!”  Transracial as a concept is another extension of white privilege, with those people – firmly situated at the top of society – experiencing an overwhelming need to identify with some other culture to validate their misplaced feelings of oppression because of their affinity for said culture.

I don’t know Rachel but this is what it feels like to me:  she’s a liberal white woman who is actually down for the cause.  She’s here for Black folk and she understands the struggle (as much as any white woman can anyway).  We all know white people like that, and I’ll just put it out there that you should really strive to make sure those are the ONLY kinds of white people you know.  Rachel Dolezal is a white woman who will have your back.  She went to Howard.  She teaches African Studies.  She’s the head of the NAACP.  But she’s weak.  She’s a weak white woman who got tired of being shushed.  

It’s not always easy to be a white ally, and a large part of that is the repeated assertion that white people don’t and can’t get it.  A lot of (most) white people truly do not, and that’s where the sentiment comes from, but for the white people who do TRULY get it, they understand that sentiment.  They also realize most white people don’t get it and they’re not offended at being scooted over to the viewing section, because the overall conversation taking place is more important than sidelining it to focus on how they feel about not being heard on a topic that does not concern them directly.  They’re not interested in taking over the conversation anyway – they just want to offer another voice.  Rachel seems like the kind of person who couldn’t stand being pushed out of the conversation so she created her own way in.  She went a step too far in sending herself hate mail to further solidify her “Blackness” and give credibility to her voice, and the ensuing investigation resulted in this whole fiasco.

Rachel is not transracial, mostly because that doesn’t exist, but also because she herself probably wouldn’t claim it.  She doesn’t “feel” like a Black person on the inside.  She’s using Blackness as an easy way to promote her own (largely well-intentioned) agenda.  Those of us who are upset with her aren’t mad because she’s white.  White allies are great.  White people have always been involved with the NAACP.  They were there when the organization was founded.  We’re upset because she put on a caricature of the people she supposedly supports because it was easier to do that than to be a much-needed white voice in support of our community.  It was too hard for her to be white and have white people shun her because of her affinity for Blackness, so she pretended to be Black instead.  Because of how race operates and because we all still follow the one-drop rule, the Black community accepted her with open arms since she appeared to have some Black ancestry somewhere.  White people do not accept you as a fellow white person for appearing to have white ancestry.   We HAVE to be Black, all day everyday and it makes us stronger people because of it.  The fact that she couldn’t handle being a white ally, couldn’t handle being white with an association to Blackness, and used persecution of Blackness as an attention-seeking “look how oppressed I am” mechanism by exaggerating and trivializing very real threats against our people is disgusting.

Plus.  Her perm is ugly and none of us want to be associated with that fried and crispy mess anyway.

10:07 am  •  12 June 2015  •   Let's talk about what you think.

| rachel dolezal| race| white privilege| transgender| transracial| news|

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