As if five minutes of fame for claiming to be black weren't enough, apparently ten minutes are needed by some people. So Rachel Dolezal, the dismissed Spokane NAACP leader, is writing a book. It's about "racial identity", something she knows less than most, since she has not figured out yet that she is actually Caucasian and continues to claim that she is, indeed, "black."
Long since her bizarre behavior became the gift that kept giving columns, and I enjoyed writing and rereading this one and also this one, Rachel has jumped back into the news with her skills with a pen, which she claims is actually a mountain lion. OK, no, she never said that. She probably did not use an actual pen either. And we'll also be amused to see who her ghost-writer actually is.
The book is now out, which means that she will have five more minutes of fame when this whole story rears its curious head all over again.
Now, I rather doubt that Rachel Dolezal will be taking advice from me, but I certainly will offer some anyway. At least, I'd like to have her address some things in the book, though I truly wonder how she will come up with enough credible content about "racial identity" to be there to publish.
I would be happy to have her, for example, explain some things relative to what she has said in just the last week. We have this little snippet: “For me, how I feel is more powerful than how I was born. I mean that not in the sense of having some easy way out. This has been a lifelong journey. This is not something that I cash in, cash out, change up, do at a convenience level or to freak people out or to make people happy. If somebody asked me how I identify, I identify as black. Nothing about whiteness describes who I am.”
"Nothing about whiteness describes who I am." OK, that brings up a whole chapter worth of possible content. What, exactly, is the way that you would describe "whiteness"? I am white, except in the State of Maryland, and I wouldn't even know where to start to distinguish what "whiteness" even means.
There are people whiter than I am in terms of skin tone, but there are people darker than I who are certainly Caucasian and purely so. There are plenty of, say, Italians who are darker than Rachel Dolezal, let alone darker than I am, and they're white to you and me. So Rachel, please devote a chapter to what it means to be white, since you obviously have a checklist on which you say you would check exactly zero boxes. I want to know what those boxes are. Maybe I really am not white.
If "nothing about whiteness" describes who you are, then do you think that you could come up with a description of who, indeed, you "are", and what that means? Because if you don't check any of the boxes as far as what whiteness is -- and you literally said none of those boxes applies to you -- then I'd love to see what the boxes are on the checklist for what is "blackness" and how you stack up there.
In fact, since blackness is such a "scaled" characteristic -- genetically we are talking about "percentage of African ancestry", which can be 100%, or it could be present but so low as to result in no visible evidence of that ancestry -- I want to know at what point on that scale does one cease to be black in the "racial identity" view of Rachel Dolezal.
I think I know her answer, because she has painted herself into a corner. By being white but claiming to "identify as black", she has effectively decided for the rest of us that racial identity is not, in fact, connected to genetics at all. It is, rather, a state of mind. In her mind, she has decided to be -- and may at this point even think she is -- black. Not genetically African; when she gets questions phrased that way she claims not to understand and walks away. Nope, it is "black", meaning, I guess, "socially black."
Given that, and given that she is now into publication anyway, I want her to do this, because she has time. Start a company. Make the company about some product or service that the Federal government would acquire. Apply for inclusion in the 8(a) program, or simply apply to be certified as a small disadvantaged business because of race (not because of her gender).
Then, when the government (I certainly hope) rejects her application because she is, in the mind of everyone else on earth, white, she needs to sue in Federal court for small-disadvantaged status. She needs to do a diary of all the interactions she has with the government and put that in as a big chapter in her book. I might even buy the book if she did that.
That would literally be the best thing she could do. If she wants people to be able to identify with the race that they "feel" rather than what is in their DNA, then what better platform than in the courts? If Rachel Dolezal believes that she is black because she "feels black", and wants other people who "feel" of a race different from their genetics then, darn it, fight for them! Give them an opportunity to get legal status.
Rachel Dolezal would be a pioneer, rather than an inkblot on history. She would prove her point about racial identity by getting the courts to see things her way.
And she'd sell a lot more books. Which is the purpose of this whole thing, of course.
Copyright 2017, 2016 by Robert Sutton
