Stop making excuses for Rachel Dolezal: The Spokane NAACP official’s fraud is unforgivable
The chapter president allegedly passed herself off as black for years
Topics: black lives matter, NAACP, Race, Rachel Dolezal, Transracial, Life News
Rachel Dolezal in 2009, standing in front of a mural she painted at the Human Rights Education Institute's offices in Coeur d'Alene, idaho. (Credit: AP/Nicholas K. Geranios)It should already be abundantly clear that the still emerging story of Spokane NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal is not your typical tale of everyday cultural appropriation. Dolezal, who’s been chapter president since January of this year, is also a part-time professor in the Africana Studies Program at Eastern Washington University and chairwoman of the city’s Office of Police Ombudsman Commission. She’s come under intense scrutiny since Thursday, when her parents came forward to say that the 37 year-old had been deceptively posing as African American. But while her story is extraordinary, it’s not her behavior that’s going to be worth noting right now. It’s the amount of ridiculous, excusing commentary we’re going to be subjected to about it. So let me just say now, as a white woman who, like Dolezal rather conveniently says, can acknowledge “We’re all from the African continent” — that is some next-level white privilege BS there. Chet Haze, you have been wildly outdone.
As the Seattle Times reports, Dolezal now says “I feel like I owe my executive committee a conversation” about what she says is a “multi-layered” issue. “That question is not as easy as it seems,” she says. “There’s a lot of complexities … and I don’t know that everyone would understand that.”
But in an interview that aired on KLXY Thursday, when asked directly, “Are you African American?” she replied, “I don’t understand the question,” and asserted that a Facebook photograph of an African American man “is my dad.” But when pressed, “Are your parents white?” she took off her microphone and walked away so quickly she left her purse and car keys behind.
Maybe if this story hadn’t blown up at such a unique moment in our cultural history — a moment when transgender rights are gaining unprecedented visibility while we still, tragically, have to say the words “Black lives matter” as if that should ever be up for discussion — Dolezal’s apparent ruse would not be sparking the conversation it has. But social media is already seizing on the debate over whether someone who “identifies as black” can be “transracial.” As a commenter on the Spokesman Review asked, “What’s wrong with identifying as a different race? Obviously she’s probably felt for years that she was black on the inside and denied it all through her childhood. I mean look at her education and profession. She’s obviously ‘transitioned’ and able to share it with the world. I would think since she’s transitioned and identifies herself as black, than we should just let her be and live her life in peace.” Let me help out here. No.
