The baffling, unapologetic, arrogant white-blackness of Rachel Dolezal (or do I call her Nkechi Amare Diallo now?) captivated the nation from day one.
But my fascination with her story goes beyond the usual reasons.
I’m certainly curious about bigger questions around race and identity. I’ve scrolled through the insightful comments in various articles, trying to understand the difference between race and gender fluidity, the white supremacy of black appropriation. But beneath the socio-cultural rubber-necking, for me, lies a deeper draw.
“ It’s that I see myself in her.
I am a white woman too. I’ve also been in several serious relationships with black men. At one point, not so long ago, as the sole white female sprinter on a college sports team, all my friends were black. My nicknames were ‘ABG,’ Albino Black Girl, and ‘Ho Girl’ (not for the reasons you might think. It’s my last name, hello!). It was embarrassing, but it still felt good to belong. I felt accepted, and like color could be more than skin deep. But the similarities go back further.
I was also homeschooled in a Christian fundamentalist family in the Midwest. Like Rachel, I broke away, and rejected that upbringing (or was it my upbringing who rejected me, because I wore pants instead of skirts and was therefore forever destined for hell?). Either way, I’ve been stuck in contrarian-rebel mode while also searching for an identity, a role, a place to fit in, a who am I really? since day one.
“ Closed-off, cultic upbringings will do that to you.
And, as you begin to brokenly navigate mainstream society, there’s nothing you identify with more than the sad, the broken, the harmed, the misfits, the ones who have been forgotten, overlooked, stigmatized, and generally stereotyped since day one. And when you rise above that, you know a certain strength that only others from similar challenges, can also know. I agree with Rachel: blackness, as an experience of disenfranchisement, and I’m going to get in trouble for this, can run more than skin deep. Just not quite like she says it does.
“ And I’ve observed the cycle in more than myself and Rachel.
Let’s take my sister, for example, four years younger. We share the same background. And as she and I leaned on each other to survive, exposed to mainstream society for the first time ever, after our parents and former group rejected us for our ‘worldliness,’ I watched her latch on to the black identity wagon too.
It evolved naturally when my parents sent her to a ‘Job Corp.’ reform-type school after she dropped out of high school, because all her peers were inner-city youth who also, as tends to be the case, came from disenfranchised minority backgrounds. So my sister started dating only black men. Then she got braids in her white-girl hair and started wearing Apple Bottom Jeans on her tiny little white girl butt. She, same Little House on the Prairie upbringing as me, started using the ‘habitual be’ as a ‘helper verb’ like, “We be going now.”* Her black boyfriend got busted stealing shower razors for her, and she got out of it by crying until the store manager felt bad for the white girl in the bad situation with the black guy. She started appropriating all the most ghetto aspects of black culture, and she told my Creole boyfriend, once, that he “wasn’t really black,” because he acted like a hipster and listened to white sixties musicians.
Then she turned her blue eyes on me. I got accused of being racist for reasons like being disgusted when her black boyfriend’s five brothers passed the blunt over me and refused to make eye contact or use my name while derogatorily referring to bitches they fucked in hotels. I got accused of “not getting the struggle” when I was appalled at her for putting her race as ‘Hispanic’ on applications when she was trying to start a modeling career.
I found the whole situation as embarrassing as my one-time college nicknames. But worse, I was watching my sister denigrate herself and reduce her chances in life in an attempt to fit in somewhere. Worst yet, in a very genuine and sweet attempt to align herself with a disenfranchised population she found certain struggle-commonalities with, she was unconsciously perpetuating ghetto stereotypes in the opposite direction. Nothing about her empathy and compassion for her black boyfriends’ struggles (and how very, very real and unfair and heartbreaking they were) was doing anything to help change those situations. If anything, it was setting them back further.
And I couldn’t even talk to her about it. Because if I tried, no matter what I said, I was impinging on her platform. This was her new identity, which meant she was an authority, which made her unassailable, and me ignorant. Just like Rachel Dolezal in her recent damning interview with Ijeoma Oluo, the one everyone’s referring to as the ‘last article you need to read on Rachel.’
Ijeoma couldn’t talk to Rachel, not really, because this was Rachel’s identity now. As the article made clear, this identity has little if anything to do with the actual black experience, not really. Rachel clung to her bylines fiercely, repeating the same soundbites from her new memoir, demonstrating a defensive lock-in to tunnel-vision neural pathways she’s decided make her her, and what she is, now.
And that’s where Rachel’s Midwestern Christian fundamentalist, homeschooled background comes into the same play as mine and my sister’s coming-of-age stories. There is an innate need in the human psyche, to categorize both oneself and others.
“ I fit here, she fits there, we fit in here, they fit over there. Now all is well with the world and I feel safe.
It’s tribal and primal and survivalist and makes sense when someone the next cave over might want part of your saber-tooth tiger kill but there’s only enough for you and yours. If you break the cave-code, you’re exiled, because this is survival.
And when exile happens, you don’t know who you are or where you fit in anymore. Your past is gone and your future no longer has roots from which to grow. You’re a walking diaspora. You are — and this is not to presume a shared experience with a physical sufferer of the following — an immigrant, a displaced person, a refugee, a stranger in your own land, even if it’s just from within. And who is left that understands? Others like you. Those scattershot, minority Others who too have been disenfranchised, made nomadic, used and spit out, the ones whose identities were decided for them when they were born, and who have had to labor under those stereotyped expectations ever since.
Rachel Dolezal tried to explain, weakly, in her book and recent interview, that having to work for everything growing up made her a slave of sorts. But what I think she can’t or hasn’t yet faced, is that her sense of chattel started with being homeschooled in Christian fundamentalism. Such a world is black and white, a locked-down situation where your identity, especially from a gender standpoint, is predetermined and you have two options: heaven, our way, or hell, and exile. There is no in-between in extremism. You are good or bad, male or female, heaven or hell. It’s the ultimate black or white thinking, and it creates, in impressionable developing minds, a need to categorize even beyond the natural human propensity.
Rachel Dolezal’s turning, like my sister’s, to an African American identity in the void of self, community and family that she found herself in, suggests to me, a natural adult reaction to identity fragmentation in early psychosocial development. As such, I believe there are many more Rachel’s out there who could benefit from less scrutiny and categorization, and more recognition of the identity crisis of adults emerging from religiously extreme childhoods.
Rachel Dolezal (Nkechi Amare Diallo?!) appears to me, perhaps not in the racial light in which she desires to be seen, but more like someone hurt and confused, defensive and begging to be let alone in the culture in which she has, finally, found a place to call home. It’s a shame that her need to lie about it, instead of frame it according to her own background needs, has the effect of perpetuating the very black and white divisions that clearly brought her to this place today.
❤ Please ‘Like’ if you think more people might benefit from reading this. ❤
For more on religion, politics and healing, check out this article I wrote on Trump’s cult, or follow me on Twitter.