It does matter if she's black or white

The furore started by her racial unmasking can, Dolezal hopes, prompt conversations that "drive at the core of definitions of race, ethnicity, culture, self-determination, personal agency and ultimately empowerment". Illustration / Rod Emmerson

Opinion

For those of us who can't seem to look away from the entire affaire de Dolezal, there are aspects that have felt at once deeply personal - perhaps even psychological - and others inherently political.

What America got on Wednesday was confirmation that it is absolutely a confusing mixture of both.

During an interview on NBC's Today Show on Wednesday, Rachel Dolezal, the former Spokane NAACP president, deployed what can only be described as an often-used strategy from the disgraced-public-figure playbook - the family - to explain her choices, her racial shifting and her public deceptions. It was an interview about a public spectacle borne of some admixture of one woman's individual issues and the complex state of racial affairs in the United States. It was stocked with a sufficient number of details to alternatively bemuse entire segments of the country and inspire bouts of righteous indignation, shock and, well, awe.

In answering the big question - if there can be just one - about whether her decision to describe herself as a black woman amounted to a life lived in blackface, Dolezal said this: "This is not some freak Birth of a Nation mockery, blackface performance. This is on a very real, connected level. I've actually had to go there with the experience ... not just a visual representation. And the point at which that really solidified is when I got full custody of my, of Isiah. And he said, 'you are my real mum'. And he's in high school. And for that to be something that is plausible, you know, I certainly can't be seen as white and be Isiah's mum."

Yes, America, yes. Dolezal said she has experienced life as a black person in America. She has done more than simply dress up and make public appearances as her notion of a black woman, all while engaged in important racial justice work. She simply let some inaccurate information stand. And, by the way, she did all of this for her family. She did it for her son.

A little background here is necessary. Isiah is Dolezal's black, adopted brother. Dolezal reportedly became the teen's legal guardian in a compromise after Isiah sought to be emancipated from Dolezal's white, conservative, Christian biological parents.

As Rachel is the biological progeny of these same parents, she too is white. And said parents blew Dolezal's racial cover late last week when contacted by reporters looking into the veracity of a possible hate crime Dolezal reported to Spokane police.

The complaint is one of nearly 10 Dolezal has reportedly filed during her tenure working as a social-justice activist in various states. It also appears that at some point, after beginning this line of work, Dolezal "became" a black woman publicly. In 2002, while a graduate student at Howard University - arguably the nation's preeminent historically black college - and expecting her biracial son, Dolezal sued the school on the grounds that she had been discriminated against as a pregnant, white woman with family responsibilities. A judge dismissed the suit.

Flash forward to Wednesday. When asked whether she is an African American woman, Dolezal said she "identifies as black". When asked about the apparent changes in her appearance since photos were snapped of her as a blond, fair-skinned teenager in what looks like an apple orchard, Dolezal said she does not avoid the sun. Dolezal also described herself as a "black hairdresser" who has long answered questions about her skin colour and identity.

When asked why she deceived people and allowed them to believe that she was black, Dolezal mentioned that over the years, newspapers first identified her as "transracial". That's a controversial term that few, if any, Americans had heard until last week, when some compared Dolezal's racial shift to Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner's outward gender transformation. Later, Dolezal said newspapers described her as biracial and finally as a black woman. She allowed the errors to stand uncorrected.

There was a lot said. And some of it is nearly impossible to dissect with certainty, as much of it seems to live only in the unique contours of Dolezal's mind. But then, that big moment happened: Dolezal implied that she needed to be a black woman in order to be Isiah's real mum.

The idea that she needed to be a black woman to engage in the work of parenting a black teen was, quite frankly, audacious and utterly counterfactual. To be sure, there are aspects of raising a black child that require particular attention to race, including interactions with armed law enforcement officers and private citizens, with which other caregivers do not have to contend. The nation's recent headlines have, of course, made that indisputably clear. But there are quite literally millions of women engaged in this work - some of them black, some of them white - around the country. Some of them are raising black adopted children and those in their custody. Others are the biological mothers of black and biracial children.

In 2010, the first year the Census tracked these figures, there were nearly 4.7 million American households where adults lived with adopted, step or biological children of a different race or ethnicity. This figure makes up about 12 per cent of all the nation's households with kids and includes every racial and ethnic combination of parents and children imaginable.

So it really is not at all "obvious" why caring for her adopted brother required her to become black - or as she described it, to allow the misconceptions of others to stand.

But never fear. Dolezal, racial shifter and mum, also told America that even in the midst of her now weeks-long ordeal, that she hopes to be of service.

The furore started by her racial unmasking can, Dolezal hopes, prompt conversations that "drive at the core of definitions of race, ethnicity, culture, self-determination, personal agency and ultimately empowerment".

It was the kind of list you might hear from someone who has read a few weeks ahead in a course on sociology of race.

But it was also the kind of buzzword-dependent commentary that most often comes from people who have not quite developed the vocabulary to describe the more-complicated world they now see, or the self-awareness to understand their place in it.