National Post (National Edition)
A HISTORY OF RACIAL PRETENDERS
In the strange and fascinating case of the suddenly and sensationally infamous civil-rights activist Rachel “I am definitely not white” Dolezal, there is something especially peculiar about the vast expenditure of effort in reporting, punditry and chat-show analysis undertaken by CNN, MSNBC, the CBC and all the dailies from the New York Times to Israel’s Haaretz and Britain’s Guardian, and the contributions from the new-media toilers at Buzzfeed and Slate and Vox and all the rest.
It’s this: nobody has managed to significantly advance the original story that veteran Idaho newspaper reporter Jeff Selle, after a mostly solitary investigation, filed for last Thursday’s editions of the plucky Coeur D’Alene Press. What little has been accomplished since last Thursday has come almost solely from the margins.
It wasn’t the Los Angeles Times art critic who revealed that the painting titled The Shape Of Our Kind that Dolezal had passed off as her own creation is a crude but nearly exact replication of J.M.W. Turner’s sublime 1840 work The Slave Ship. It was somebody on Twitter who first noticed it. The discovery that this same Rachel “I identify as black” Dolezal unsuccessfully sued Howard University in 2002 for discriminating against her because she was a white woman was made by a saucy little webzine called The Smoking Gun.
What we know, then, comes almost wholly from Jeff Selle’s old-fashioned spadework in Coeur D’Alene, and the story is basically this: at some point, perhaps 15 years ago, the bright, blonde, blue-eyed daughter of a slightly eccentric Christian couple in Montana started fabricating a fake identity for herself, bronzing her skin, putting her hair up in weaves and pretending to be a black woman. It might have something to do with her parents having adopted four AfricanAmerican children. Nobody seems to be able to explain it, least of all Dolezal herself.
After establishing a public persona as a black “mixed-media” artist and an outspoken education director with the Human Rights Education Institute in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, Rachel Dolezal moved to Spokane, Wash., about an hour’s drive west, and claimed bi-racial, African-American and Native American ancestry in her successful application for the chairperson’s post with the Spokane Police Ombudsman Commission. She was taken on as a teacher of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University and settled in as president of Spokane’s chapter of the venerable National Association for the Advan- cement of Colored People (NAACP).
As the Coeur D’Alene Press disclosed last Thursday, Dolezal was not, as she had claimed, raised in a teepee in Montana and did not grow up hunting animals with bows and arrows. The African-American man she called her “dad” is not her father. An African-American boy she called her son is one of her stepbrothers. The white man she called her stepfather is her biological father. She was not beaten with a “baboon whip” when the family was living in South Africa. Dolezal never lived with her family during her parents’ brief sojourn in South Africa.
A significant constituency of lowbrow reactionary American opinion is delighted to hold up the Dolezal story as though it were proof that civil-rights activists, feminists and environmentalists are just a bunch of liars and phonies. At the highbrow end of things, Camille Gear Rich, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Southern California, was summoned against the rabble to present an awkward sociology lecture on racial identity that appeared as an essay on CNN’s web page: “Dolezal’s involuntary outing was staged by her angry parents who felt left behind as she chose a life associated with being a black person.” This, too, is hogwash.
Dolezal’s parents came into it only by answering Salle’s questions on the record in an honest, straightforward fashion, with readily verifiable and falsifiable statements, spoken in the language of common speech. This is what used to be called telling the truth. In dramatic contrast, Dolezal’s champions have offered up the most obtuse and wildly point-missing disquisitions on the social construction of race and ethnicity and on Dolezal’s entitlement to her own nuanced identity and personal “truth.” Dolezal concedes only that she has engaged in “a little bit of creative non-fiction,” and besides: “We’re all from the African continent.” Magnificently sophisticated, that bit.
Still, the Dolezal story has set off a great deal of healthy reflection upon the fact that ethnic identity and one’s sense of belonging and community do not, and should not, depend on blood quantum or skin tone or otherwise toxic notions of “race.” Even U.S. President Barack Obama himself is a descendant of not only Africans, but of white slave owners, as well. It’s complicated. But none of this needs to depend on the telling of lies.
What prompted Salle to call Dolezal’s parents in the first place was that police in Spokane and Coeur D’Alene always came up empty whenever Dolezal lodged one of her many complaints of racial harassment. Do- lezal claimed to have been the victim of eight hate crimes. She said she’d been forced to move several times, and each time her house was broken into. There were death threats, swastikas were painted on her office door, nooses were left lying around her property, somebody tried to kidnap her son — and yet, no charges.
The Coeur D’Alene Press took it all quite seriously. Until it was driven out in 2001, the paramilitary whitesupremacist Aryan Nations cult was headquartered a short drive north of Coeur D’Alene, at Hayden Lake. Was it possibly that their thugs were back, and they were targeting Dolezal and the NAACP? Could it be that Dolezal was just making all this stuff up?
As things have turned out, Dolezal had fashioned a career for herself in Coeur D’Alene and in Spokane by simply making stuff up. So no, Dolezal is not an even an “ally,” as some white people like to fashion themselves. She is in no way comparable to any of the brave white people of the 1960s civil rights movement, some of whom were murdered for their efforts in the Freedom Ride campaigns in the Deep South.
But there is a tradition to which Dolezal does belong.
Back in the 1990s, a lovely little children’s book called The Education of Little Tree, extolling the homespun virtues of Cherokee life that prevailed before the time of Indian residential schools, was a New York Times bestseller. It was made into a movie. Its author turned out to be not Cherokee at all but a white man, Asa Earl Carter, a vicious racist, a member of the Ku Klux Klan and a speechwriter for the segregationist Alabama governor, George Wallace.
More recently there was Ward Churchill, a gruesome loudmouth from the ethnic studies department of the University of Colorado who got cut a lot of slack for his hideous pronouncements until 2005, when the little Rocky Mountain News revealed that there was nothing to Churchill’s claims to be Muskogee, Creek and Keetowah Cherokee. A survey of more than 140 of Churchill’s forebears failed to come up with a single Native American.
In Canada back in the 1920s, we had Grey Owl, an Englishman, an ugly drunk, a serial philanderer and abuser whose real name was Archie Belaney. Grey Owl was the toast of the Upper Canada press, the deeply spiritual nature-conscious Noble Red Man prototype against which Canada’s aboriginal people continue to be evaluated and judged. Around the same time there was also Buffalo Child Long Lance, a mixed-race charlatan from North Carolina who pretended to be the son and heir of a high-born Blackfoot chief. For a time, the Vancouver Sun employed him to write columns about British Columbia’s native people.
Black people, aboriginal people, white people and everyone else — we all deserve better than this. However we choose to “identify,” it shouldn’t need to depend upon lies.
However we choose to identify, it shouldn’t need to depend upon lies