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Are you who you think you are?

Christopher Curran
Posted 6/25/15

The now well-known saga of former Spokane, Wash., National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) President Rachel Dolezal has stirred great discourse on how an individual …

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Are you who you think you are?

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The now well-known saga of former Spokane, Wash., National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) President Rachel Dolezal has stirred great discourse on how an individual identifies one’s own heritage. Is heritage a matter of determining one’s DNA, or is heritage more a matter of acculturation? Was there a benefit gained from Ms. Dolezal’s transformation?

We grow up being told we have a certain origin. He is Irish, she is Italian, he is Spanish, she is Irish and Italian, or we break the divisions down to erroneously arrived-at percentages. I am 25 percent Polish and 75 percent Rumanian.

We accept these proclamations as a matter of identifying ourselves to others without a mere thought of how unreliable and presumptuous the assertions truly are. Most genealogists can only accurately trace a few centuries of any given lineage, mostly through government or church records. Medical technicians can examine one’s DNA and identify clustered frequencies of “alleles” to determine an approximate idea of race or heritage, but without absolute certainty. Thus, the limited amount of an individual’s history uncovered leaves in question the hundreds of perhaps migrating generations that came before. An easy and inevitable intermingling of races and cultural groups occurred pervasively. So, are you who you say you are? Moreover, does the heritage that you espouse have more to do with how you were conditioned rather than your actual ancestry? Perhaps more importantly, should the character of a given individual fall prey to presumption because of a proclaimed pedigree, which may not be accurate in the first place?

In the case of Rachel Dolezal, a “white” woman of mostly European descent believes she is “black” by desired acculturation rather than the endogenous markers in her DNA. Those who assign the term African American to themselves have denounced Dolezal as crazed or deceitful for her self-portrayal. On the contrary, maybe Dolezal found solace in a supposed struggling minority and those identifying as black should be complimented by her transformation.

In fact, Dolezal was so immersed that she taught Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University. According to Dolezal, “the question is not as easy as it seems, there is a lot of complexities … and I don’t know that everyone would understand that.” She is right both personally and objectively. For Dolezal, she had four adopted African American siblings that one would reason she identified with. She was married to a black gentleman for four years. She attended a historically black university whose curriculum is naturally indicative of black sensibilities. She felt alienated and estranged in her adulthood from her parents Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal, which undoubtedly also may have driven her to assume a separating identity from the father and mother that she was excommunicated from.

Besides the psychological aspects of Dolezal’s cultural conversion, the sociological questions beg argument. If Rachel Dolezal has been an exceptional advocate of the African American community, lived her life as an African American, and arose to the pinnacle of her profession as a chapter president of the NAACP, should her DNA difference matter?

Well according to her German, Czech and Swedish heritage mother, Ruthanne, it does. Ruthanne stated: “Her effectiveness in the causes of the African American community would have been so much more viable and would have been more effective if she had just been honest with everybody.”

However, Dr. Camille Zubrinsky-Charles, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, differs with Dolezal’s mother. She expressed: “For the most part, being a part of that community doesn’t require someone to claim that identity,” and, “Maybe she saw her whiteness as a barrier to doing the advocacy work in the social justice world.”

Whiteness as a barrier is an interesting concept for someone seeking a cause to bring meaning to one’s life. Fifty years after the Great Society programs of the 1960s were initiated, the industry of social divisiveness still thrives through organizations like the NAACP and cultivators of dissent like the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. As long as the perception of societal struggle exists, the drive toward some abstract utopian world for African Americans will attract people of many heritages as carriers of that curious cross.

Certainly, ignorance is the seed of bigotry, which often grows into injustice. Nevertheless, our country and our society is fairer and more equitable than it has ever been in our history and those who claim that the blunt cudgel of prejudice is as heinous and ubiquitous as it was 50 years ago have some other self-serving objective which is neither altruistic or steadfast. Correlatively, if the line of demarcation between the races is blurred and inherently inaccurate, then the industry of social divisiveness becomes moot.

So, the true mystery of this grand ponderous question of race identification lies in self-definition. Ask a Caucasian what their pedigree is and likely they will answer with the aforementioned descriptions. In other words, I am half of this or a quarter of that. Contrarily, an African American will say simply I am black, as did Rachel Dolezal. Yet, like the rest of us, the description of black is also a supposition.

The president of the United States, Barack Obama, is as much Scotch-Irish and English as he is of African descent, although, he self-describes strictly as a black man. For generations prior to the last half-century, light-skinned people of African descent have “passed” as Caucasian in order to find more open doors of opportunity.

On balance, their accurate lineages were irrelevant to their capaciousness for success. Furthermore, Dolezal’s actual ancestry was just as meaningless.

She apparently proved herself in many forums to be a zealous and productive advocate of black causes. So if she is more accurately described as white, what does being white really mean? More succinctly, is being Occidental accidental, or is it a manner of conditioning and learning, like knowing one’s surname?

If we were able to trace a particular person’s pedigree back the last 4,000 years of man’s development, an anthropologist would discover so much intermingling of race that no one would be who they thought they were. Perhaps race is a condition of the mind rather than the blood.

As famous civil rights advocate Martin Luther King once said: (his hope) “… will one day live in a nation where they will not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Good words. Maybe the self-proclaimed civil rights leaders of today will follow them when they judge Rachel Dolezal, and for that matter everybody.

Comments

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  • falina

    Why can't a white person work for the advancement of other "races"? Shouldn't we ALL be working to ensure the best opportunities for EVERYONE? Isn't that what being human is about?

    Thursday, June 25, 2015 Report this

  • Justanidiot

    No.

    Monday, June 29, 2015 Report this