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I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck
Why I’m Not Watching Netflix’s “The Rachel Divide”
I don’t like Rachel Dolezal. I don’t believe she’s misunderstood or mentally unbalanced or confused. I think she’s a shameless attention-seeker, a vile narcissist, and a grifter. She’s a thief. And the thing she covets the most and is desperately trying to misappropriate is Blackness, specifically the Blackness unique to the descendants of American slaves.
To be the descendant of an American slave is to live in a particular kind of purgatory. It is to be the abused and neglected child who always eats last. It is to stand outside in the wet cold and be denied entry to the vast mansion your ancestors built. It is to be harassed and brutalized by police forces born out of slave patrols. There are daily humiliations, constant reminders that you are of the lower caste. It is to know that your existence is seen as a threat, a threat that may be met with deadly violence at any moment.
The freedom struggle of the descendants of American slaves has a proud tradition that has produced true American heroes. That platform of resistance is an honored space, one that Rachel Dolezal infiltrated with her appalling blackface routine. She was the president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP when she was outed by a local reporter who asked the simple question: “Are you African American?” Stunned that she had been found out, the only reply she could muster was, “I don’t understand the question.”
Soon after that embarrassing interview, it was revealed that Dolezal was White and had been pretending to be a light-complexioned Black woman for years. As evidence, she had shared a photo of her with an African American man she barely knew as one of her and her father. What sort of pathology drives a person to do a thing like that? The same thing that drove her to make claims of racial harassment and report hate crimes, none of which could be substantiated. There’s also the disgusting way she’s taken on the label of “transracial” — co-opting the struggle of perhaps the most marginalized group and turning it into a punchline. Write it down: the next outrage will be her faking a serious illness for sympathy. This is when everyone else will finally turn on her and begin to call out her lies. When she was…
