ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
Rachel Dolezal is white. So why would she pretend to be black? Why would anyone?
It’s the weirdest thing.
The last time I’m aware of anyone white pretending to be black, other than in blackface, was in 1959, when John Howard Griffin shaved his head and dyed his skin dark brown to experience how African-Americans are treated. Of course, Griffin, who had the good fortune of returning to his white life, discovered it isn’t easy being black.
Griffin documented his experiment in a book titled "Black Like Me" and later in a movie by the same name.
This was no experiment for 37-year-old Dolezal, and from what I can discern from reading news reports, she has been parading around in blackface for years. She has professed an affinity for black people since she was a teenager, when her parents adopted four black children. She chose a college where she could immerse herself in racial issues. She married a black man — no surprise there — and built a reputation as an advocate for civil rights.
Last year, Dolezal, 37, was elected president of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the NAACP and is credited with lifting its finances, visibility and membership. Good for her.
Then the curtain was lifted on her charade and on Monday, after a week of speculation about her race, she stepped down.
There are plenty of stories of whites putting on blackface, but Dolezal may be the first who actually seemed to want to live her life as a black woman. How weird, given the way black women have been and are stereotyped and socially marginalized. I mean we’re the welfare queens, the hypersexual Jezebels, and so angry we could pop a top any minute now.
Who in their right mind would want to operate under such stereotypes?
Apparently Dolezal.
“Her narrative and timetable have an air of self-serving and underhanded opportunism,” said Charles Gallagher, chairman of the sociology department at LaSalle University.
She’s raised in the whitest part of the country (Montana), where the only diversity left are American Indians. She gets four adopted black siblings at a time when diversity and multiculturalism as a topic and concern is exploding. She sees that in places where there are very few racial minorities (like Montana and Idaho) that there is a certain cachet or hipness or coolness with being black (as long as the number is small, it’s fine); she sees this in her formative years and starts to reinvent herself.
Black college, black grad school, black husband — she learns the performance of blackness, moves and presents herself as black with a black storyline and sporting a black look.
On NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday morning, Dolezal used the word “survival” to describe her plight; to spin her claim that her whiteness was why she was being mistreated at Howard and race-based attacks on her in Spokane because of her blackness.
"Rachel figured out a way to capitalize on her blackness much like blacks 'passing' as whites could capitalize on the social and economic privileges of being white," Gallagher said.
I suspect that's why so many African-American have come to her defense. They understand wanting, needing to be something other than who you are.
Besides, they argue, Dolezal did much to help the black community as if forgetting she could’ve helped without deceiving the community, too.
Black or white, that’s what most of us can’t wrap our heads around. Readers like Ruben Brown and Jim Ostenson couldn’t.
“Deception is deception, regardless of one’s motives,” said Brown of Atlanta. “While I’m not sure of the whys and hows of Ms. Dolezal’s actions, I feel confident in saying that she could have contributed and accomplished the same things for the NAACP as a white person. As Dr. King said, the content of one’s character is what truly matters, not the package that we come in.”
There are no rules saying whites can’t head NAACP chapters. Not only are they members, they helped found the organization.
Had Dolezal run for the position as a white woman and won, Ostenson said that would be fine, but to “feel like she is black” is absurd.
“For someone to pretend to be black and accept a position of leadership in the Spokane NAACP is an offense to everyone in that chapter of the NAACP,” he said Monday. “From the comments her parents made in an interview this morning, that woman has more baggage than Delta Air Lines in her life right now.”
In a statement posted on Facebook on Monday, Dolezal said she was stepping down “out of allegiance to the cause of racial and social justice and the NAACP.”
Really? So why the farce?
Dolezal is quoted in a 2010 New York Times article as saying she would be “nervous” going to a tea party gathering because of all the white people who would be there.
Oh, please.
This is what makes her story so offensive to me. Dolezal was able to borrow her blackness without ever suffering from the harsh consequences of actually being black in America.
About the Author
