Rachel Dolezal: Crossing the colour line, when whites act black

PERHAPS when the history of our times is written one day our century will be called the century of crossing the line.

We cross the lines in our pursuit to do what we do in excess, the definition of success and arrival itself is linked with excess and surplus in what we do and achieve.

The world has provided many lines and many borders that we need to cross and even transgress in order to achieve change and progress, for the better or the worse. In his 1903 seminal essay E.W. B Dubois an African American sociologist defined the “problem of the Twentieth Century” as “the problem of colour the line”.

In that pithy definition of the problem of the century Dubois joined many philosophers before him and preceded many after him that have powerfully mediated on the problem of race and racism as systems of classifying and hierachising human beings, a system that slavery and colonialism deployed in the inferiorisation, exploitation and oppression of the black race in the world.

Importantly, Jamaican philosopher Charles Mills in 1997 published a forceful essay in which he denounced the venerated social contract idea as a myth; the world was operating under an unwritten but powerful “racial contract” where race was actually the world order and racism a social and political constitution of the world. Over the centuries, white supremacists have relied on the works of biologists, philosophers and some theologeans that have come up with theories that validate exactly how black people were created inferior to white peoples and why their lack of progress in the modern world is connected to their natural inferiority. Charles Darwin is such a theorist who gave so much energy to racists and white supremacists. In the justification of economic inequalities and marginalisation of blacks, Adam Smith was also key in rationalising the poverty of the displaced and disposed peoples of the world as the work of an “invisible hand.” In the ages of slavery and colonialism, and the ongoing long duree of Euro-American imperialism euphemised as globalisation and modernisation, scientific racism has continued to be relied upon by racists to claim the inferiority of black peoples and rationalise their exploitation, exclusion and marginalisation. As a result, decolonial philosophers especially the liberation theologeans and philosophers of liberation among them have in turn invested much effort in deconstructing and debunking racism and especially its white supremacist version. To suddenly claim that races must end and human beings must emerge may as well appear like an attempt to erase and silence the crimes of race and racism in the world as one Rachel Dolezal has had to learn the very hard way.

Rachel Dolezal and the colour Line Sometime in 2015 two Americans, Ruthanne Dolezal and Lawrence Dolezal approached relevant authorities in the USA to disclose that their daughter was moving and working around pretending to be black when she was white. That is when Rachel Dolezal resigned from her post as the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, an organisation that fights for black rights. Previously in 2002, Rachel had successfully sued the Howard University for discrimination against her as a white woman after the university denied her a scholarship on the grounds that she was white and privileged. Rachel went on to change her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo and published a book, In Full Colour: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. She claims to be transblack at most and at best she insists that “I have always identified as black.” Presently, under the invitation of a South African organisation, Quest for a Non-Racial South African Society, Rachel Dolezal is touring South African universities preaching the gospel of the end of races, non-racialism and “triumph of the human spirit.” To her, like to many contemporary thinkers, race is a social construct that we must urgently deconstruct and get ahead with our lives as human beings on earth. In her world, people should, democratically thinking and speaking, be allowed to at least choose their race and at most be allowed to be raceless. philosophical debate of the high voltage type. She has been called a fraudulent race faker, a criminal white woman that has drawn salaries that should have been drawn by deserving black people, by pretending to be what she is not. She has been told that she, like others now and before, could have contributed to fighting racism in America and in the world without claiming to be black. The question has been asked to her why she spends so much time and intellectual effort trying to convince the world that she is black if she believes that races should not exist. Some interlocutors have stated that it is only a powerful and privileged white person that can change their race at will. Black people and other nonwhite persons have faked whiteness only to escape the misery and suffering of being non-white in a white world. A white person who fakes blackness is equal, Rachel has been told, to a white racist supremacist that wants to use scientific arguments to escape white guilt and accountability for racism in the modern world. In that way, Rachel would be an opportunist that wants to cleverly cross the colour line to avoid accounting for the power and privilege that whiteness has given her. She is also a race traitor that denies her race to feel good and earn fame. In the ability to claim blackness, to be able to tour the world defending her claimed identity, Rachel has been accused of power and privilege, really oppressed and exploited black people do not have the opportunity or the luxury to sing their blackness and take their song across the seas, in other words Rachel Dolezal is a white woman that is performing blackness for personal gain and fame, opening doors for more white people to opportunistically escape being white while keeping the power and privilege that it has given them over the centuries. One student used the metaphor of a wolf that suddenly claims to be not only one among the sheep, but a sheep! In one of her arguments, Rachel invoked the example of Michael Jackson who “successfully” changed from black to white, and even tempered with his skin and bodily organs to be and to look white. It is there and then that most of her interlocutors realised that perhaps she has entered a debate for which she is not philosophically prepared. Rastafarian slogans and all. Many people are using laws and even fraud in the world to change their nationalities, to cross the geographic and physical borders. There are two lines that stubbornly resist easy crossing; the colour line and the religious line, of the religious line it is especially the growing divide between Christianity and Islam that is proving to be one of the pricky problems of the Twenty First Century. Race and racism as a social and ideological construct have not remained as constructs in the world but they have become a living system and a character of the present world order. The black world has suffered political, economic, spiritual, cultural and psychological penalties and other punishments in a white ruled world for a long time now. Consequences of white supremacy and antiblack racism are going to be felt in the Global South for a long time to come, it seems. For a white skinned person to simply propose that we all forget about race and racism and continue with life as human beings is a tough and highly problematic request. It is for that reason that under critical scrutiny at the Jourberg Theatre, after a real grilling from some University of Johannesburg students, Rachel Dolezal publicly threatened suicide. In actuality, the future world really demands white and black people that are disgusted by racism. It requires people of all races to seek common familihood of all human beings. Not only that, whiteness and blackness as fundamentalisms, need to commit suicide for common humanity to be located, a suicide of spirit and consciousness. That is not going to be as easy a walk as Rachel Dolezal seems to think, it is a walk that needs memory and critical awareness of how the present world works, how racism is still a problem even in the Twenty First Century. Without the hard work of dismantling coloniality itself as a global power structure that deploys racism as a system of classifying human beings a non-racial world cannot be imagined.

In 2016, in an essay “What is Racism?” Ramon Grossfoguel dropped a real bombshell when he claimed that racism has begun hiding itself behind other guises beyond the simple colour line. To Grossfoguel, sexism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, ableism, Zionism, tribalism and linguistic and cultural chauvinism are all forms of racism in the modern world. For that reason, people like Rachel Dolezal, whatever their good intentions are, might be helping to conceal rather than unmask the problem of continuing racism in the world.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: decoloniality2016@gmail.com