{"id":6602,"date":"2017-04-15T16:00:28","date_gmt":"2017-04-15T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multiracial.com\/?p=6602"},"modified":"2021-07-03T06:05:52","modified_gmt":"2021-07-03T06:05:52","slug":"its-not-rachel-dolezal-whos-crazybut-the-ridiculous-racist-and-contradictory-definitions-of-african-american","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/2017\/04\/15\/its-not-rachel-dolezal-whos-crazybut-the-ridiculous-racist-and-contradictory-definitions-of-african-american\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Not Rachel Dolezal Who\u2019s \u201cCrazy\u201d But the Ridiculous, Racist and Contradictory Definitions of \u201cAfrican American\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Not Rachel Dolezal Who\u2019s \u201cCrazy\u201d But the Ridiculous, Racist and Contradictory Definitions of \u201cAfrican American\u201d<\/strong><\/h1>\n
\"A.

A. D. Powell<\/p><\/div>\n

Is <\/span>Rachel Dolezal<\/strong> a war criminal? If she were, you can bet the farm that the outraged blacks, pretend blacks (mulattoes and quadroons) and white liberals who denounce her for \u201cpassing for black\u201d would have forgotten about her and moved on by now. Instead, the former Spokane, Washington NAACP leader is a prime example of how rather unimportant actions by those who have a history of \u201cwhite\u201d identification or classification are redefined by racial pundits as the moral equivalent of Ku Klux Klan lynchings. Nearly all Dolezal\u2019s attackers insist that there is a clearly defined and impenetrable barrier between the so-called white and black \u201craces.\u201d<\/a> They rarely bother to clearly tell their readers who is and is not \u201cwhite\u201d or \u201cblack.\u201d They presume that every member of their audience is just supposed to \u201cknow.\u201d The denunciations of Rachel Dolezal fall into roughly three categories:<\/p>\n

1. Dolezal has no right to call herself \u201cblack\u201d because she does not (or did not) \u201clook black\u201d and can exercise the \u201cprivilege\u201d of going back to being \u201cwhite\u201d at any time.<\/a> So is everyone who looks white and identifies as black a fraud or crazy fool? Often the latter are declared heroes of the \u201cblack race.\u201d There is a clear double standard here. You can google the term \u201cpassing for white\u201d and be deluged with denunciations of part-black white people who dared to call themselves white because they actually looked white. Nearly all these denunciations come from people who identify themselves as \u201cblack\u201d or the white liberal allies of blacks. The very fact that Rachel Dolezal felt compelled to physically change her \u201cracial\u201d appearance from \u201cwhite\u201d to \u201cmulatto\u201d in order to \u201cpass\u201d as someone who might be acceptable to middle-class blacks and white liberals as \u201cblack\u201d supports the rational argument that the part-black whites who identify as white (Anatole Broyard, Captain Michael Healy, Eston Hemings Jefferson, Belle Da Costa Greene, Anita Hemmings and many others) are moral and rational in their choice\u200a\u2014\u200afar more so that those of the same or similar racial makeup and phenotype who choose to call themselves \u201cblack\u201d or pretend that they had no choice in the matter (Mat Johnson, Michael Sidney Fosberg, Soledad O\u2019Brien etc.). Indeed, there is a long history of, especially with the rise of the post-Civil Rights \u201cBlack Power\u201d movement, coercing mixed whites and light mulattoes to change their racial appearance in order to please or fit in with blacks:<\/p>\n

Afros have \u201csaved\u201d many of the young light-skinned colored Creoles who choose now to identify themselves as black and disavow any connection with colored Creole society. The Afro has become symbol of their social and political affiliation. So keen was the criticism of Creoles by non-Creole blacks, especially in the early 1970s, that light-skinned teenage boys whose hair was straight began to put vinegar on their hair to make it kinky. A couple of young informants swear that several of their friends are beginning to grow bald, and they attribute this loss of hair to their frequent shampooing with vinegar. Afros may be the current hairstyle among black Americans, but among young male colored Creoles they are political symbols, too. It is no accident that seventy-eight of the eighty-five thirteen-, fourteen-, teen-, and fifteen-year-old boys who were confirmed at Corpus Christi parish in the heart of the colored Creole community on May 20, 1977, light- and dark-skinned alike, had Afros.<\/em><\/p>\n

Virginia Dominguez. White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana<\/a> (Kindle Locations 1919\u20131924). Kindle Edition.<\/p>\n

The next question to ask ourselves is why, if Dolezal is wallowing in a supposedly immoral \u201cwhite privilege\u201d that can be assumed or jettisoned at any time, part-black folks with the same \u201cwhite privilege\u201d aren\u2019t condemned for calling themselves \u201cblack\u201d as well:<\/p>\n

I was told the fourth interview I would be doing was going to air on MSNBC-BLK, which focused on Black issues and targeted millennials. I went in with the hopeful idea that it might be like having a conversation with my students, but it was just more of the same. As I took a seat on an uncomfortable stool, an animated light-skinned Black woman named Amber Payne started asking me questions. I noticed that we were nearly the same complexion and her hair wasn\u2019t all that much different than mine, falling in a loose, wavy pattern with very little curl. If she\u2019d run a flat-iron down her hair, she could have easily passed for Italian. Surely with her ethnically indeterminate appearance she would be a bit more understanding, I thought. After all, most of those who had reached out to me to express their support were people stuck somewhere in the middle of Black and white. Darker Black women, on the other hand, had become one of the primary voices of opposition against me, calling the way I identified \u201cthe ultimate white privilege.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Dolezal, Rachel. In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World<\/a>(pp. 238\u2013239). BenBella Books, Inc.. Kindle Edition.<\/p>\n

2. Dolezal has no \u201cblack experience\u201d or has never experienced \u201cracism.<\/a>\u201d The terms \u201cblack experience\u201d and \u201cracism\u201d are not defined and seem to mean whatever each accuser wants them to mean. I have often heard the argument from black-identified \u201cone drop\u201d advocates and their allies that if one is \u201craised black\u201d (undefined), one has some kind of moral and\/or legal obligation to identify as \u201cblack.\u201d This makes as much sense, to me, as saying that if you were raised with child abuse, you have an obligation to pass along the abuse to your own children. Despite, Dolezal\u2019s \u201cpure white\u201d parents, she was reared with adopted black and mulatto siblings, married a black man and bore mulatto children. She\u2019s been living a far \u201cblacker\u201d life than Soledad O\u2019Brien (rich white husband and very white children), Lacey Schwartz (reared as white and Jewish), or Michael Sidney Fosberg (reared as white and Armenian-American until discovering his \u201cblack blood\u201d in adulthood) and so many more. What is even more ludicrous is the accusation that Dolezal only identifies with blacks in order to reap financial benefits. Hell, people like Lacey Schwartz, Michael Sidney Fosberg, Mat Johnson, Soledad O\u2019Brien, Sil Lai Abrams and many more have capitalized on presenting themselves as exotic, passable or born-again \u201cblacks.\u201d Dolezal hasn\u2019t yet come close to them in terms of reaping the black gold of hypodescent:<\/p>\n

Many people simply couldn\u2019t fathom how someone who was born into the racial category known as white could ever feel Black or why that person would want to be viewed that way. They presumed I identified as Black to advance my career or make more money, and the press seemed happy to play along. There was never any mention of the fact that two of the four jobs I\u2019d had were unpaid, that one of the paid ones barely covered the electric bill, and that the other provided only enough income to pay the rent and buy groceries. My income had always hovered around the poverty line, and in that regard I was not unlike many other Black women in the United States, who, studies have shown, make 16 percent less in the workplace than white women do.<\/em><\/p>\n

Dolezal, (p. 245).<\/p>\n

Morever, Dolezal\u2019s sanity has been questioned<\/a>. Who would be crazy enough to identify with blacks if they don\u2019t have to? Well, why aren\u2019t black-identified whites like Mat Johnson or Michael Sidney Fosberg condemned as equally insane since their claim to blackness can be easily shed?<\/p>\n

Same opinion shares The Huffington Post\u2019s culture writer, Zeba Blay. According to her, Dolezal\u2019s life in comparison to Caitlyn Jenner is \u201can insult to Jenner\u2019s personal struggle\u201d (Blay, 2015). She also notes that Dolezal\u2019s lies and \u201cpretending\u201d to be black \u201chijacked the conversation about race, during a week where the nation was focusing on police brutality in McKinney, Texas\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200awhen white policeman \u201cviolently restrains, then sits on top of an unarmed, 15-year-old, bikini-clad black girl\u201d (Blay, 2015). Blay also suggests that Dolezal is delusional and mentally ill. Moreover, she points out that Dolezal retains her privilege; \u201cshe can take out the box braids and strip off the self-tanner and navigate the world without the stigma tied to actually being black\u201d (Blay, 2015). Blay same as Kinouani (2015) states that Rachel Dolezal\u2019s blackness is a costume that she can put on anytime she wants, meanwhile Bruce Jenner transformed into Caitlyn in order \u201cto live\u201d and not being interesting, which may suggest that Dolezal transracial affair could be caused by her need to get attention.<\/em><\/p>\n

Borawska, Sonia. Rachel Dolezal Affair: race, identity and representation of women in the news. : Comperative analysis between media coverage of Rachel Dolezal and Caitlyn Jenner<\/a> (Kindle Locations 105\u2013113). Kindle Edition.<\/p>\n

3. Dolezal is not \u201cgenetically African American\u201d or has no known or traceable \u201cblack\u201d or sub-Saharan African ancestry.<\/a> Of course, the world has an abundance of people with African ancestry who DON\u2019T identify with blacks at all. Latinos fall into this category, especially nationalities like Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. Arabs, especially North Africans, also fall into this \u201cblack ancestry\u201d category, yet the U.S. Government has taken great pains to have them officially classified as \u201cwhite\u201d for census and affirmative action purposes. Dolezal\u2019s accusers are clearly trying to imply that (minus Latinos and Arabs) there is a \u201cone drop rule\u201d for defining \u201cAfrican American\u201d and that Dolezal lacks the fatal \u201cdrop.\u201d This alone is supposed to make her \u201cwhite.\u201d Now suppose Dolezal had the fatal \u201cdrop\u201d but wanted to identify as \u201cwhite.\u201d The same pundits who ridicule her for darkening her skin and kinking up her hair would praise her for it. Indeed, while Dolezal is promoting the popular academic idea that \u201crace\u201d is a \u201csocial construct,\u201d her detractors are openly claiming that \u201crace\u201d is biological, no ifs, ands, or buts<\/a>. I have studied this issue of \u201cblack blood\u201d and white racial identity for decades, and it is clear to me that the excuses made for separating the so-called \u201cpure\u201d or black-blood-free white from the \u201ctarbrushed\u201d while is based on nothing more than a fight to keep alive the old stigma of \u201cNegro blood.\u201d Culture, looks, etc. are all excuses to fool the gullible. Furthermore, the people who want the stigma of \u201cblack blood\u201d and its twin \u201cwhite purity\u201d to continue, are more likely to be black-identified and middle-class:<\/p>\n

In 1999 The Washington Post published an <\/em>emotional article<\/em><\/a> by one of its so-called \u201cblack\u201d reporters, Lonnae O\u2019Neal Parker, in which the author described her trauma when she discovered that her first cousin, Kim, was white-identified. This shouldn\u2019t have been too surprising since Kim was born to and reared by a \u201cpure\u201d white mother, looks totally white, and has a \u201clight-skinned\u201d mulatto father who was not keen to identify with blacks. O\u2019Neal Parker\u2019s article became a nationwide sensation. The Seattle Times and other papers reprinted it and ABC Television\u2019s Nightline devoted an entire episode to it. O\u2019Neal parker\u2019s highly irrational thesis was that Cousin Kim and all others in a similar situation have an obligation to repudiate their white ancestry and identify with blacks in order to make up for any wrongs done to blacks and black-identified mulattoes by whites in both the present and the distant past. In other words, the \u201cone drop rule\u201d is presented to the public as a sign of black moral superiority instead of black biological inferiority. Cousin Kim supposedly chose the evil, racist whites over the innocent, pure-hearted blacks. This is also the way the \u201cone drop\u201d myth was justified in The Human Stain and the attacks on Anatole Broyard. O\u2019Neal Parker, who is herself mulatto elit<\/em>e\u200a\u2014\u200anot physically black but not as white as Kim\u200a\u2014\u200ahas no problem incorporating white genes into her family, but she does not want whites in it since whites are defined as the enemy.<\/em><\/p>\n

Powell, A.D., Passing For Who You Really Are: Essays in Support of Multiracial Whiteness <\/a>(Kindle Locations 303\u2013315). Backintyme. Kindle Edition.<\/p>\n

The black-identified elite\u2019s insistence on promoting the \u201cone drop rule\u201d and demonizing all who oppose it has permeated white liberalism. Indeed, many white liberals have therefore become more racist than the more conservative whites they love to despise. The \u201cone drop rule\u201d allows them a chance to be \u201cliberal\u201d and white purity-loving racists at the same time\u200a\u2014\u200aall with the permission of \u201cblacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the magazine <\/em>American Heritag<\/em><\/a>e, a white woman named Jillian Sim announced that she had discovered that her great-grandmother was Anita Hemmings, a white mulatto or mixed white who graduated from Vassar College in the late 19th century was almost expelled for being \u201ccolored\u201d when a wealthy and envious classmate decided to have her background investigated. Now Vassar proudly claims that Anita, who lived as white for the rest of her life, was their first \u201cblack\u201d graduate. Jillian Sim accepts the myth that Anita was a \u201cblack\u201d who \u201cpassed for white\u201d and she condemns both her paternal grandmother and great-grandparents as \u201cblacks\u201d who \u201cpassed for white.\u201d Sim, her father, and her son, however, are still white. The dead are \u201cblack\u201d and the living are \u201cwhite.\u201d After Broadway star Carol Channing\u2019s recent disclosure that her father was partially black but lived all his life as a white man, you\u2019ll notice that Channing is not described as \u201cblack\u201d in the media but her father is described that way without qualification. Moreover, if you look at the Amazon.com comments on Channing\u2019s autobiography, Just Lucky, I Guess, you\u2019ll note that commentators who are black-identified insist on calling her \u201cblack\u201d as well. People as diverse as the actress Mae West, former U.S. President Dwight David Eisenhower and former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, etc. have been labeled \u201cblack\u201d (usually by blacks and black-identified mulattoes) on the basis of the one-drop myth.<\/em><\/p>\n

Powell, A.D..(Kindle Locations 388\u2013400).<\/p>\n

It is no wonder that liberals are having a field day crucifying Rachel Dolezal. She is the great white sacrificial lamb, proving that they are not \u201cracist\u201d because they are following the lead of blacks. Black condemnation of Dolezal also reassures white liberals that they are fundamentally different from (and therefore superior to) the \u201crace\u201d they claim to champion. Indeed, they exercise the ultimate \u201cwhite privilege\u201d by acting as if they have no obligation to think for themselves on racial issues but need only follow the lead of certain blacks:<\/p>\n

Liberal white folks who were happy to repudiate their white privilege were just as happy to throw me under the bus. From what I\u2019ve observed, white liberals tend to believe that whatever they read in The Root or Huffington Post\u2019s \u201cBlack Voices\u201d section represents the perspective of the entire Black population and that to hold any other view would be racist. For them, being called racist is the ultimate taboo, and mimicking the viewpoints espoused by these mainstream Black news sources presents a safe and defensible path for someone who hasn\u2019t experienced racism as a lived experience. By accusing me of being a cultural appropriator and a fraud, countless white liberals, including the \u201cantiracist essayist\u201d Tim Wise, were hoping to prove they weren\u2019t racists but rather white allies.<\/em><\/p>\n

Dolezal, Rachel.(p. 248).<\/p>\n

I personally don\u2019t care what Rachel Dolezal calls herself. What I do care about is that the \u201cone drop rule,\u201d which has no basis in law and is mainly enforced by the inflated moral authority of the black and black-identified elites, be recognized as the immoral and racist monstrosity that it is. I want an end to the demonization of fellow mixed whites as \u201cpassing for white\u201d when we are really \u201cpassing\u201d for what we truly are. Dolezal accidentally became a target of hypocritical and near-universal scorn because the advocates of the \u201cone drop rule\u201d feared that her alleged blackness minus the fatal \u201cone drop of black blood\u201d would be a further nail in the coffin of extreme hypodescent. Call Rachel Dolezal \u201cblack\u201d if that\u2019s what she wants, but call Anatole Broyard<\/a>\u201cwhite.\u201d Do you get the picture?<\/p>\n

\n

A.D. Powell, former columnist for the web sites \u201cInterracial Voice\u201d and \u201cThe Multiracial Activist,\u201d is the author of \u201cPassing\u201d for<\/em> Who You Really Are: Essays in Support of Multiracial Whiteness<\/em><\/a> and a self-taught historian of \u201cmixed race\u201d issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Not Rachel Dolezal Who\u2019s \u201cCrazy\u201d But the Ridiculous, Racist and Contradictory Definitions of \u201cAfrican American\u201d Is Rachel Dolezal a war criminal? If she were, you can bet the farm that the outraged blacks, pretend...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[63,5],"tags":[126],"class_list":["post-6602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-d-powells-view","category-tma-articles-and-commentary","tag-racial-classifications"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/AD-Powell.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p89tuq-1Iu","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6602"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6862,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6602\/revisions\/6862"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}