Rachel Dolezal has been stripped of her job, community positions, and credibility because she lied about who she is. She has been passing as Black! When asked if she was Black in a recent interview, she answered "I identify as Black". Her parents say she is white, but in various times and contexts, she has identified as white, mixed and Black. But, I ain't mad at Rachel because her dilemma has stimulated a great deal of conversation about what race and ethnicity mean in the political, economic and social arenas.
Rachel is right about one thing, racial identity is a complex issue.
Race is a social construct that humans use to talk about variations among human beings based on biological characteristics. Race is something that human beings made up and in reality does not exist. We all have the DNA of one woman, we shall call her Eve. Biogeneticists tell us that she hails from the Sub-Sahara of Africa or Asia and lived about 140 thousand years ago. Every single person on the planet carries her DNA in the mitochondrial part of our cells. So in fact, biologically we are one race, the human one, and we are all siblings.
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| Can you tell who is who? |
One of the first characteristics we use to identify people is race, along with gender and age. However, the fact is that visually, racial determination is extremely unreliable. There are people in every race ranging from light to dark complexions, sporting curly to straight hair, with broad to thin features. That's why Rachel could pass so easily, because there are many African Americans who look just like her in her current presentation.
Unlike race, ethnicity is not bound by biology.
Ethnicity is determined by those characteristics or artifacts that are learned by a group of people and are taught from generation to generation. Language, values, traditions, and worldview are just a few of the things that are included in one's ethnicity. Foods, processes and even ways of thinking are part of one's ethnic group. Because ethnicity is learned, anyone can adopt or identify with another ethnicity. People come here from all over the world and become American, both a nationality AND ethnicity.
One can change one's ethnicity within a lifetime. Learning to speak the language or dialect, adopting ways of movement and mannerisms, acquiring a different world perspective, making different food choices and even choosing hair styles can be part of choosing a new ethnicity. Therefore, I think that people can be trans-ethnic because they can learn new things. However, while they can change all the learned things, THEY CANNOT CHANGE THEIR BIOLOGY.
Rachel Dolezal's crime is not that she changed her ethnicity, but that she lied about her race.
It is the lie that destroyed her credibility. How can we believe anything she says, how can we accurately interpret her behavior if we don't know who she is? If she lied about her race, what other things did she lie about? Her lie even damaged the reputation and credibility of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. They were fooled, bamboozled and it leads people to question the capabilities of the organization itself. Dolezal could have accomplished the same things she accomplished while passing for Black as her own self. Membership and leadership in the NAACP are not dependent upon race, but upon intent, purpose, capabilities and hard work. Whatever she was trying to do has been undermined or even destroyed. Lies can do that to a life.
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| Dr. Marquita Byrd |
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