THE UNFATHOMABLY STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL DOLEŽAL

By Andrew Stewart

In perhaps one of his finest performances, Eddie Murphy went undercover as a white man
(http://criticalmediaproject.org/cml/media/eddie-murphy-white-like-me/) in 1984. With the aid of
NBC's make-up department, Murphy went around New York City and was able to partake in some
exaggerated but not-too-inaccurate white privilege. Entering a newspaper vendor's shop, he was given
periodicals for free. After the only black man onboard exits a bus, the white driver turns on swing
music and one of the passengers transforms into a cocktail waitress. At a bank, after an African-
American agent quite reasonably refuses 'Mr. White' a loan because he has absolutely no resources or
credit, a white agent ushers his colleague out the door, tears up the paperwork, and literally forks cash
over the desk. After more than three decades, the skit remains undeniably relevant and true because, if
anything, our dialogue about race and racism has gotten worse.

So when the story of Prof. Rachel Doležal became a minor internet sensation on June 12, the
anniversary of the Medgar Evers murder, I found myself puzzled and impressed by the quandary.
Immediately some tried to link Doležal's plight to that of Caitlyn Jenner and claim this was an instance
of 'trans-racial' persecution. But despite that obnoxious brain-fart, there are real issues of race, gender,
and class that are worth discussing here. But first it is important to begin with the basic facts.

Prof. Doležal teaches part-time at Eastern Washington University, having previously studied at Howard
University, and has held a variety of roles in both educating people about race and racism along with
art. She also has reached several positions of repute, including President of the Olympia branch of the
NAACP and a police commissioner for the Office of the Police Ombudsman in Spokane. She has
several adopted black siblings, married a black man, and has a teenaged black son. Beginning with an
earlier video interview (https://youtu.be/oKRj_h7vmMM) and culminating with a public statement by
her parents, Doležal has found herself unable to answer basic questions about her parentage. “She’s
clearly our birth daughter, and we’re clearly Caucasian — that’s just a fact... She is a very talented
woman, doing work she believes in. Why can’t she do that as a Caucasian woman, which is what she
is?”, her father told the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/rachel-dolezal-naacp-
president-accused-of-lying-about-her-race.html?_r=0).

The first place to begin is race. When it comes to plagiarism and appropriation of black culture without
credit, white people have a booming industry. Elvis Presley stole his entire show from Chuck Berry,
The Rolling Stones took their entire musical arrangement from blues performers (though in their
defense, once they made it big they would hire these heroes as opening acts), and humanity has yet to
recover from the nightmares of Kenny G and Vanilla Ice. But there is also the much more wicked
history of caricatures and stereotypes, be it black face minstrel shows or hyper-violent, over-sexualized
black male villains in action pictures like DIRTY HARRY. Even the neoliberal Barrack Obama has
remained a constant figure of Other-ing by the white power establishment, as pointed out by Yvette
Carnell in her recent interview for CounterPunch Radio (http://store.counterpunch.org/yvette-carnell-
episode-4/). As host Eric Draitser said in that discussion, there is something that is 'quintessentially
American' about racial prejudice. In our culture, pigmentation has been utilized by capitalism as a tool
of wage gradation. Oftentimes, people look back to the boom years of the 1950s and the benefits
granted World War II vets by the GI Bill, forgetting that black vets were granted none of those benefits
and, as a result, were left out of this prosperity, creating yet another form of generational systemic
racism. Since before the Revolutionary War, our society has been fostered by a stratification of
privilege based on race, and the Founders knew it, that was why Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave
owner, once wrote to a constituent:
 [T]his momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I
considered it at once as the knell of the Union. [I]t is hushed indeed for the moment. [B]ut this
is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. [A] geographical line, coinciding with a marked
principle, moral and political, once conc[ei]ved and held up to the angry passions of men, will
never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say with
conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to
relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. [T]he cession of that kind of
property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if,
in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with
due sacrifices, I think it might be. [B]ut, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can
neither hold him, nor safely let him go. [J]ustice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the
other.

Next is gender, which is linked to race. There is the history of the one-drop rule, which dictated
second-class citizenship for African Americans if they had one small percentage of black ancestry,
totally based around a long history of demonizing black male sexuality and the notion that black men
are rabid sexual beasts. And there is also the idea that inter-ethnic coupling somehow sullies the white
woman who marries a black man. It is very hard for me as a white man to accurately portray in writing
a real understanding of how violence against women of color truly works, but it is all around us. When
Ronald Reagan talked about 'welfare queens', he meant black women. When we hear Michelle Obama
called the President's 'baby mama', it is made manifest. Every time a Congressional delegate stands up
and bashes a so-called 'food stamp culture', they mean single mothers of color. In the utterly disgusting
public shaming of Anita Hill for whistle-blowing on the sexual harassment of her former boss, now-
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the organized white resistance, spurred by the writings of
David Brock, labelled her 'a little slutty and a little nutty', tapping into the wellspring of bigotry against
black femininity. I once heard a saying which I can find no attribution for, yet it rings true: This nation
was built on the backs of single women of color.

Finally, the all-important issue is class, which is very much defined by the previous two. Prof. Doležal
was able to portray herself for a very long time as a light-skinned, highly educated woman of color.
Tone preference, where those with lighter pigmentation in the black community are given privilege
over those of darker tone, is a real phenomenon. What's more, as a woman, there was a real effort to
hold this individual up as an example of what can be achieved, putting her in the pantheon next to
Michelle Obama. And this is not simply an issue of playing make-believe, this is a case of actual fraud
because Prof. Doležal habitually marked her ethnicity as African American on various official forms.
How many boards and committees, under these false pretenses, chose Prof. Doležal for a position
under the auspices of affirmative action hiring policies? There is a long and well-developed critique of
the black bourgeoisie in American society, a group of professionals who have been able to make certain
gains in the dominant white supremacist society by sacrificing at the altar of progress the majority of
their fellows who remain in poverty. Harry Haywood, the black Communist who became a major
figure within the Party during the Third Period and later went to fight in the Spanish Civil War said this
in 1933(https://www.marxists.org/archive/haywood/1933/09/x01.htm):
The enslavement of the Negro masses in the United States is an important prop of American
imperialism. American imperialism is fundamentally interested in the preservation of the slave
remnants in Southern agriculture and the national oppression of the Negro people as a condition
for the extraction of super profits. It is the force that stands behind the…white ruling classes
...in their direct and violent plunder of the Negro masses… Therefore, the liberation struggles
of the Negro masses are directed against the very foundation of the capitalist-imperialist social
structure in the United States… The Negro masses, once the allies of the Northern bourgeoisie
 (during the Civil War and Reconstruction), have now become the allies of the proletariat. In
their struggle for national liberation these masses constitute an important part of the army of the
revolutionary proletariat… In this connection it is important to keep in mind the dictum of Karl
Marx to the English working class on the Irish question: "A people which oppresses another
people cannot itself be free."

As this small tempest in a tea pot unfurled into the following week, things became more and more
interesting. First, on Monday, June 15, it was revealed that Doležal had resigned her post at the
NAACP, offering the following (https://www.facebook.com/spokane.naacp/posts/1623781377868883):
I have waited in deference while others expressed their feelings, beliefs, confusions and even
conclusions – absent the full story. I am consistently committed to empowering marginalized
voices and believe that many individuals have been heard in the last hours and days that would
not otherwise have had a platform to weigh in on this important discussion… Please know I
will never stop fighting for human rights and will do everything in my power to help and assist,
whether it means stepping up or stepping down, because this is not about me. It's about justice.
This is not me quitting; this is a continuum. It's about moving the cause of human rights and the
Black Liberation Movement along the continuum from Resistance to Chattel Slavery to
Abolition to Defiance of Jim Crow to the building of Black Wall Street to the Civil Rights and
Black Power Movement to the #‎BlackLivesMatter movement and into a future of self-
determination and empowerment.
Almost simultaneously, it was reported that Doležal, then using the name Rachel Moore, had sued
Howard University in 2004, claiming the historic black college had discriminated against her based on
race, pregnancy, family responsibilities, gender, and out of retaliation because she was white
(http://breakingbrown.com/2015/06/rachel-dolezal-once-sued-howard-univ-for-discrimination/). Any
remaining doubts I had about her intentions were made clear by this legal brief. The most honest
description of this issue was made by blogger Rafi D’Angelo
(http://soletstalkabout.com/post/121350496180/trangender-vs-transracial-caitlyn-jenner):
I don’t know Rachel but this is what it feels like to me: she’s a liberal white woman who is
actually down for the cause… But she’s weak. She’s a weak white woman who got tired of
being shushed… It’s not always easy to be a white ally, and a large part of that is the repeated
assertion that white people don’t and can’t get it. A lot of (most) white people truly do not, and
that’s where the sentiment comes from, but for the white people who do TRULY get it, they
understand that sentiment. They also realize most white people don’t get it and they’re not
offended at being scooted over to the viewing section, because the overall conversation taking
place is more important than sidelining it to focus on how they feel about not being heard on a
topic that does not concern them directly. They’re not interested in taking over the conversation
anyway – they just want to offer another voice. Rachel seems like the kind of person who
couldn’t stand being pushed out of the conversation so she created her own way in… She’s
using Blackness as an easy way to promote her own (largely well-intentioned) agenda. Those
of us who are upset with her aren’t mad because she’s white… We’re upset because she put on
a caricature of the people she supposedly supports because it was easier to do that than to be a
much-needed white voice in support of our community. It was too hard for her to be white and
have white people shun her because of her affinity for Blackness, so she pretended to be Black
instead. Because of how race operates and because we all still follow the one-drop rule, the
Black community accepted her with open arms since she appeared to have some Black ancestry
somewhere. White people do not accept you as a fellow white person for appearing to have
white ancestry. We HAVE to be Black, all day everyday and it makes us stronger people
because of it. The fact that she couldn’t handle being a white ally, couldn’t handle being white
with an association to Blackness, and used persecution of Blackness as an attention-seeking
 “look how oppressed I am” mechanism by exaggerating and trivializing very real threats against
our people is disgusting.
The fact D'Angelo offered this gem on June 12, prior to news breaking about the Howard lawsuit,
makes the irony all the more powerful.

Martin Luther King Jr., a man who has been throughly mis-represented by the popular media, once said
to a majority-black audience:
Somebody told a lie one day. They couched it in language. They made everything Black ugly
and evil. Look in your dictionaries and see the synonyms of the word Black. It’s always
something degrading and low and sinister. Look at the word White, it’s always something pure,
high and clean.
What was going through this individual's head when she decided to essentially pull a modern rendition
of Mammy is anyone's guess, I would say opportunism. But regardless of how her mind works, what
she did was degrading and low and sinister.

Andrew Stewart is a documentary film maker and independent journalist who lives outside Providence.
His film, AARON BRIGGS AND THE HMS GASPEE, about the historical role of Brown University in
the slave trade, is available for purchase on Amazon Instant Video at (http://www.amazon.com/Aaron-
Briggs-HMS-Gaspee-CarolynFluehr-Lobban/dp/B00TE4R8IK/ref=sr_1_1?
ie=UTF8&qid=1429928604&sr=8-1&keywords=aaron+briggs) or on DVD at
(http://www.amazon.com/Aaron-Briggs-Gaspee-Richard-Lobban/dp/B00WFHHPSQ/ref=sr_1_2?
ie=UTF8&qid=1429928604&sr=8-2&keywords=aaron+briggs).