Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation

Beyond Law and Rights

Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Austin Sarat

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479803705
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

The work at hand for bridging the racial divide in the United States From Baltimore and Ferguson to Flint and Charleston, the dream of a post-racial era in America has run up against the continuing reality of racial antagonism. Current debates about affirmative action, multiculturalism, and racial hate speech reveal persistent uncertainty and ambivalence about the place and meaning of race – and especially the black/white divide – in American culture. They also suggest that the work of racial reconciliation remains incomplete. Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation seeks to assess where we are in that work, examining sources of continuing racial antagonism among blacks and whites. It also highlights strategies that promise to promote racial reconciliation in the future. Rather than revisit arguments about the importance of integration, assimilation, and reparations, the contributors explore previously unconsidered perspectives on reconciliation between blacks and whites. Chapters connect identity politics, the rhetoric of race and difference, the work of institutions and actors in those institutions, and structural inequities in the lives of blacks and whites to our thinking about tolerance and respect. Going beyond an assessment of the capacity of law to facilitate racial reconciliation, Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation challenges readers to examine social, political, cultural, and psychological issues that fuel racial antagonism, as well as the factors that might facilitate racial reconciliation.

1

Racial Fakery and the Next Postracial

Reconciliation in the Age of Dolezal

Matthew Pratt Guterl

If you don’t fit into one box and if you don’t stay there your whole life, being identified from birth as who you are—what does that look like?

—Rachel Dolezal, interviewed on Today, April 12, 2016

This is, in brief, the story of two images, representing two very different contexts and, by extension, a pair of radically different Rachel Dolezals. These are images you’ve probably seen, but they are also easily found online.

In the first—widely circulated by the press after her “outing”—a teenage Rachel Dolezal sits on the ground, surrounded by the racially variegated, adopted family her parents had assembled. She has blond hair and pale skin. She is dressed, coiffed, and curated as white, presented as a complement to the blackness of her adopted siblings.

In the second, contradictory image, Dolezal is in the foreground, her hair wrapped, her fist raised, surrounded by her students at Eastern Washington University. At the time it was taken, this second image was meant as an erasure of the first, which was well hidden and kept from the public. If the earlier photo of the adopted family emphasized—as many such families and many such photos do—juxtaposition in a diverse ensemble, the later image deployed skin color and fashion and politics in support of a big, bold deception. It was meant to mobilize a particular kind of racial sight, to encourage the eye to see her as black, to correlate the hair wrap and the skin and the wardrobe with the politics and the semi-fictional backstory, to lead the eye to make a great, half-thought assumption.

What is the relationship between these two visions of Rachel Dolezal? Does one contradict the truth of the other, revealing a history of subterfuge and deception? Or do they mark plot points on a private narrative of racial passage and personal transformation? Do they capture, as well, a unique chapter in the national history of racial passing?

There is a long history of white folks passing for black. Most of this history involves some kind of elaborate disguise—makeup or blackface; attention to hair, clothing, and manner—but it also usually emphasizes a certain degree of transcendence. During a trip to Spartanburg, South Carolina, in the early 1920s, Jean Toomer made it possible for Waldo Frank to pass as black so the older writer’s evocative descriptions of African American life in the deep Jim Crow South would be more accurate. Frank found the experience utterly moving. In Black like Me, the 1961 memoir of a politically purposeful trip across the color line, John Howard Griffin recounted his dawning awareness of racial prejudice in the deep South. In the 1987 film Soul Man, the character Mark Watson donned blackface so he could accept a minority scholarship to Harvard. In much of this history, the emphasis is on white feelings, on the discovery of empathy, having “walked a mile in someone else’s shoes.” In this way, as Baz Dresinger notes, white-to-black racial passing rests on physical proximity, and on a comforting narrative of “awakening,” envisioning the forsaking of racial privilege as noble self-sacrifice, and acknowledging it as a precondition, perhaps, of reconciliation and justice.1

These two images and this long history are the context for the “postracial” subject position of Rachel Dolezal, the great fake of the summer of 2015, whose existential wanderings across the color line, uncovered dramatically in a live television interview and explained in the weeks that followed, were widely seem as a distraction from much more serious matters. Her decision to claim blackness, and the charged, provocative subterfuge of her performance, provoked media attention and public outrage and was read as an ironic reminder that even in the aftermath of Ferguson, blackness could still be seen as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement. Throughout all the high comedy and the melodrama, though, Dolezal consistently saw herself as an avatar for a racially reconciled future and defended her right to “be” black.

With the benefit of two years’ reflection, I’d like to take up the story of Dolezal and her “trans-racial” subject position. I’d like to read it, as she did, through the experiences of Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender sports figure. I’d like to ask what it means to celebrate racial self-fashioning as if it were akin to gender transitioning, and I’d like to think about the broader cultural responses to Dolezal’s story of passing and subterfuge. “I am always a sort of ‘bridge’ between white and black worlds,” she told a student reporter, stressing her role as a reconciling figure, long before she was uncovered by the local press.2 In light of this volume’s collective discussion of reconciliation as a meaningful practice, rooted in sincere and meaningful movements toward a more just future, I’d like to reflect on Dolezal’s positions, and also on what it means that her passage into blackness was punctuated by the death of so many in Charleston, by the reminder of the structural real world. More than anything, I’d like to move back and forth between this rather existential story about one woman’s quixotic quest to re-make the racial self and the everyday, violent truths of modern America. Big, general questions leap out: In a moment where whiteness is afforded great structural advantage, where dark skin color can make you a literal target, is there an odd, offbeat lesson here in the story of a woman born to racial privilege who choses to “become black”? Does “meaningful” or “progressive” racial reconciliation require, as she has suggested, a rejection of race? An assumption of someone else’s race? Does it allow for an abridgment of the gap between categories? Does it allow for subterfuge and insincerity? In our responses to Dolezal, are we obliged to naturalize race? To reject Dolezal’s crossings because we imagine, bio-politically, that white-to-black crossings are never permanent? And to suppose that her work, rooted in years of deception, must therefore be suspect?

In the end, while I appreciate her arguments about the fluidity and contingency of race, I have serious reservations about Dolezal’s project, which draws, as I see it, on long-standing, exclusive associations of blackness with suffering and which fits a disturbing pattern, historically, of white women gaining access to the gains of Affirmative Action. There is more, too: Whatever else she hopes to accomplish, I conclude, Dolezal surely wants to profit from her proximity to blackness and from the empathy she archived in her years lived as a woman of color. That should trouble us all.

* * *

Making sense of Rachel Dolezal requires, first, that we narrate the events of the summer of 2015, that we trace her rise as an object of public fascination and her subsequent descent into relative obscurity.

The interview that started it all lasted eight minutes.3

Dolezal wore a smart black-and-white patterned suit, the light background peppered with random, dark-colored geometric shapes, a striking metaphor for her subject position, a woman born white masquerading as black, deploying tiny pieces of evidence—darkened skin, a kinky hairstyle, photographs of mythic family, and, above all else, her determined commitment to justice—to establish a new racial position. As the camera rolled, she never once referred to herself as black, as African American, as a woman of color; instead, she called herself, repeatedly, “a mother with a black son,” working the ancient lines of matrilineal descent in reverse.

The cameraman tucked her into the right side of the screen, allowing the day-to-day of life of downtown Spokane to be reflected in the black marble backdrop on the left. She stood across the street from the downtown mall, in front of a Starbucks, framed by that wall of polished stone, fielding questions about a series of local hate crimes and threatened mailbox bombings. Meanwhile, cars and pedestrians, bright and shiny, and the outline of the corporation’s mermaid logo, were reflected behind her, a distracting background swirl of late capitalism.

KXLY4’s Jeff Humphrey had reached Rachel Dolezal, president of the Spokane branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), after leaving a business card at her residence. He was trying to get to the bottom of a long-simmering story about hate mail sent to the local branch, purportedly from Coeur d’Alene. Just a few decades earlier, that small Idaho city—twenty or so miles east of Spokane along Interstate 90—had been home to a white supremacist compound. A recent surge in bomb threats, all received through the mail, had led Dolezal to push for an investigation, but journalists in eastern Washington were finding it hard to substantiate any serious threat. Postmarks were missing from envelopes. There were no witnesses to comment on the receipt of the mail. It seemed like an inside job, which meant that someone had used a key, circumventing the usual process and placing the offending letters directly in the NAACP’s box. Only a few people could have done that, and everything seemed to swirl around Dolezal.

The start of the interview, then, was about hate mail and a post office box key, about the presumption that something weird was going on, and that the local head of the NAACP was, rather strangely, behind it all.

At six minutes, the interview changed. The camera zoomed in, and the cameraman switched to a shotgun mike. Dolezal’s face got larger, then, and her voice got louder, but she was still determinedly off center, and the polished façade behind her continued to reflect back to the camera the mall’s traffic. Watching the raw footage now, her off-centered-ness is fascinating, as is her ability to twist Humphrey’s questions to generate sympathy. Asked about the mailbox key, she invoked her motherhood and wondered how anyone could ever suggest that the mother of a black child could have schemed up a fake threat. Asked about her determination to stand up for racial justice—a leading question, designed to reveal egomania—she deftly critiqued the very notion that publicity could be a positive good. “That,” she admitted, “is not the kind of publicity anyone wants.” When Humphrey asked her whether her father had ever made it up to Spokane, she got a sad look in her eye for just a moment and then referred to her dad’s ongoing battle with lung cancer and suggested that it wasn’t going well.

Finally, Humphrey, an avuncular news personality, held up a printout of a picture posted on Dolezal’s Facebook feed, and asked, with a slight note of incredulity: “This man right here is your father?”

The image revealed a smiling Dolezal, dressed in white, standing next to a dark-skinned man, who was also smiling. His arm was around her, and they evinced a certain kind of intimacy and familiarity. Before posting the image to social media, she had added a few words of text: “Special Guest Jan 19.” The intimate affect and shared smile linked the two together, presumably, as father and daughter:

“Yes he is,” she replied slowly. “You have a question about that?”

“Yes, I do, ma’am.” “Are you African American?”

She looked perplexed. “I don’t understand the question.” Then she recovered. “I did tell you that that was my dad.” She gestured to the paper, to the representation of blackness, to the simple idea that intimate proximity was proof of family relations, proof of her own blackness.

Then her eyes faded a little.

And when Humphrey started to ask her if she had two white parents, Dolezal simply walked off camera.

In Spokane, the news media had been acutely aware for months that something unusual was happening. Online stories about Dolezal routinely got anonymous comments questioning her race. Rumors had circulated for years—Melissa Luck, the manager of KXLY4, remembered that Dolezal had been less than truthful about her racial background. As the press struggled to verify the details of the hate mail inquiry, it commenced a parallel—and very quiet—investigation into Dolezal’s personal life story.

That day, the camera crew had been driving all over town looking for her, leaving those business cards at every stop. Dolezal had called Humphrey to let him know that she was meeting someone for coffee at the downtown Starbucks at 5 o’clock and that she could spare a few minutes for an interview. They set up hastily on the street right outside the shop, and Dolezal set her purse and her phone down in a small planter against the wall. At the close of the interview, as the final question about her racial provenance hung in the air, she tossed the wireless mike to Humphrey, but absentmindedly left her purse and the phone behind.

Ernie, the cameraman, followed her into the dress shop next door, where she’d retreated, to return them.

He found her on the store phone, animatedly talking to someone. By his own admission, Humphrey was simply too embarrassed to go in.

Defined by the interview, Dolezal appeared in that month as an icon of self-invention just ten days after Caitlyn Jenner appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair—re-imagined by Annie Leibovitz—and released her new name to the public.

Soon, Dolezal’s fantastic, fictional biography had been partially unearthed. She’d been born in a teepee and had lived in South Africa, where she’d been lashed with a baboon whip by cruel parents. She’d been selling greeting cards to pay for her own clothes since she was a child and hunting for her own food, too. Those same parents had determined the severity of punishment based on the skin tone of their offspring, and their cruelty ultimate led to her escape—and her assumption of parental responsibilities over some of her siblings. She’d married an abusive man, gotten sick with cancer, and survived both. Moving to Idaho with her dark-skinned son, she’d taken up a job at a human rights institute, but they’d been subject to racial taunts and threats of violence. Through it all, she maintained a steady performance rooted in her vast knowledge of African American history and American racial politics. “She opened the door and looked at me,” once student reporter remembered, “with unexpected green eyes, a caramel skin complexion, and a warm smile.” Rumors spread, too, about a deeper truth, about her white past, the adopted black siblings passed off as her own children, and her tumultuous, formative years at Howard, where she’d once sued the university for reverse discrimination after it had attempted to withdraw its offer of a full scholarship to a master of fine arts program.4

At first, a sympathetic passing narrative took hold. “Dolezal’s view of herself,” wrote Allyson Hobbs, author of the first social history of racial passing, “reveals an essential truth about race: It is a fic...