TRICK OR TRUTH
Three years have passed since Rachel Dolezal, an attractive, single mother of two AfricanAmerican boys, was unmasked as a white woman passing for black and fired from her post as president of the local chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People). She’s resigned from teaching at Eastern Washington University, changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo, and published a book about her life.
But the online reviews of Netflix’s new documentary, The Rachel Divide, suggest that her story continues to evoke sneering, fuming contempt— particularly from people of colour.
Few of those interviewed on camera sympathise with her, either. But her story is definitely thoughtprovoking. In our racially polarised world, surely it’s unusual, if not daring, to embrace blackness? As one preacher says to his African-American audience, “... you angry with her ’cause she picked up what you tryin’ to throw away!”
The second child of devout Pentecostalists in rural Montana, Dolezal-now-Diallo has a faux Afro and honey-coloured skin. She claims that her parents, from whom she is estranged, punished and disliked her.
It’s those same parents who outed her as white when she was spearheading protest demonstrations for the NAACP. They tell the documentary-makers she is a compulsive liar—though they cannot explain why their daughter insists that she’s black. Yet they’re not as standard issue as they may seem. In middle age, they took the unusual step of adopting four children of colour, three boys and a girl. Diallo was a teenager at the time. Two of these step-siblings, Izaiah and Esther, support Diallo’s claims of parental abuse, tainting the parents’ credibility.
While nearly everybody in the film derides Diallo’s view that “how you feel is more powerful than how you’re born”, it’s notable that this idea closely echoes the transgender position—now widely accepted.
This is an age of the beauty business, sex-change surgery and millions of everyday illusions of artificially darkened hair, high heels, contact lenses and orthodontistry. So why not a white woman who wants to live black? Just another twitch in the fluid dynamics of our identity.