Rachel Dolezal still runs ‘trans-racial’ race

since passed off as her son.

With Dolezal’s credibility undermined, the charges against her accused brother were dropped. She also has been accused of telling falsehoods on other occasions.

The movie offers a more sympathetic portrait of Dolezal than I have seen in the past, but that’s not saying much. The portrait is marred by Dolezal’s dogged determination to have her way and live her racial philosophy, even when it appears to cause visible pain for her own three children. Franklin, 13, her biological son from her first marriage — to a Howard University classmate she says insisted on getting married but refused to see her as black — steals the show. Showing a calm maturity and self-awareness beyond his years, he tries without much success to persuade his mother to, like, please ratchet her unorthodox racial consciousness down a few notches.

Her 17-year-old adopted brotherturned-adopted son, Izaiah, is biding his time until he can get away to college and leave mom’s notoriety behind.

That’s too bad, since I find Dolezal’s challenge to America’s ancient racial conventions to be her most interesting narrative. In a TEDx Talk available online, she treats race as changeable as a new pair of shoes. “Is the identity that you were assigned at birth the best description of who you really are and what your purpose is for being in the world?” she asks. “What is life if we can’t draw our own pictures and write our own stories?”

I agree that race is a social construct, but it also carries too much historical baggage for even the determined Dolezal — who in the film’s final scenes changes her name at a local courthouse to her new identity, Nkechi Amare Diallo — to overcome.

“Everyone already hates you,” a woman tells her with a sigh, “so you might as well go on being yourself.”

That appears still to be Dolezal’s/Diallo’s philosophy. To me, as an AfricanAmerican, her widely complimented skills at styling black hair, like her now-ended NAACP leadership, is a sign that she feels fully committed to her black identity. Most of the rest of us have yet to be convinced.