White is the new black

WHEN she was a teenager, her parents adopted four black children whom she adored. She went on to marry a black man and to attend Howard University, a mainly black college, where her degree focused on black culture. So although her hair was blonde and her skin was lily-white in the early 2000s, it did not cause great surprise when Rachel Dolezal began to say, first, that she was part-black, and then that she identified as black pure and simple.

This might have stayed a private matter, but she was a public person: teaching in the Africana Studies department at East Washington University, and rising to become an energetic president of the NAACP in Spokane, in Washington state. Her increasingly loud declarations of blackness, as her skin and hair grew gradually darker, annoyed her estranged white parents, who declared the whole thing rubbish. The press and the blogosphere caught her out in multiple fibs; the social commentariat, both black and white, lambasted her. On June 15th she resigned from her NAACP post, but without apology.

Her argument was that racial heredity did not constitute identity. Identity was a subjective, fluid thing: “From my truth”, and “in this moment”, “nothing about being white describes who I am.” Younger Americans increasingly speak that language. Confining yourself to a racial box, as for the census, can be irksomely imprecise. People can also feel trapped in the wrong body; something which, in sexual terms, now draws sympathy rather than abuse. Ms Dolezal’s troubles erupted soon after Caitlyn (née Bruce) Jenner had graced the cover of Vanity Fair as a transsexual. Wasn’t Ms Dolezal just the same, in racial terms?

Not as far as blacks are concerned. For a white to love black culture or even make black music is one thing; it is quite another to put on blackface, as Ms Dolezal did in effect. As many blacks point out, she decided to be black from a position of long-established white privilege, a choice none of them enjoyed; some scoffed that she might take blackness off, as it suited. As Terry McMillan, a writer, tweeted, “I wonder what race Rachel would become if she got stopped by the police?” Her case also revisits, in a bizarre reversal, the old Jim Crow laws: she seemed positively to want a ruling that even one drop of black blood would be enough to make her black.

Yet the tangles go further. Whites have seldom wanted to be taken for black in America; it has tended to be the other way around. But this is changing. Minority voices often carry more weight, and Ms Dolezal was well aware of this. As a minority white at Howard, she sued the university for not helping her financially for partly racial reasons; but she gave her race as black (as well as white and mixed-race) when she applied to be an ombudsman in Spokane. In most of the jobs she went for, being black was an advantage. Perhaps that was why she felt so compelled to be something she never was.