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The Privilege of Choice or Musings on Artifice

I was asked to write about Rachel Dolezal, the head of the Spokane NAACP chapter in Washington who identified herself as black. Like Ms. Dolezal, I had grown up in Montana and had spent time in Spokane, where I attended law school. Unlike her, I have always been black, which was solidified by my parents’ black faces and embrace of black culture.

Before I could put pen to paper, two events impacted my frame of mind.

One, a recent visit to Memphis, where I was invited to speak at the Tennessee Bar Association’s Annual Convention. Memphis is known for many things, including Elvis Presley, great barbecue and — most importantly — the site of Martin Luther King’s assassination.

Two, nine churchgoers were gunned down in cold blood in Charleston, S.C., by a 21-year-old psychopath who waivered on executing his victims because they were “nice” to him. South Carolina is one of the few Southern states that proudly fly the Confederate flag that, by law, cannot be lowered to half-mast out of respect for the dead.

Before my visit to Memphis and the massacres in South Carolina, I was regaled in the funny jokes about Ms. Dolezal. Witty comments on Twitter asked about her knowledge or lack thereof of black culture. They were tongue-in-cheek and caused us to trivialize the issue, making fun of her, and us, at the same time.

I had to ask myself whether I really cared if she had lied about her ethnicity, especially if she was “doing good” work. I also had to ask why we were so amazed by a white person pretending to be black. After all, in one of his more famous standup routines, Chris Rock joked that even the most poor white person would not opt to trade places with a black man, under any circumstances, including him and he is rich! He continued that, “When you are white, the sky’s the limit! When you are black, the limit’s the sky!” Maybe it was the oddity of her “identification” that caused the media to descend upon Ms. Dolezal’s fanciful story.

After some time, the story became tiresome. Every day, more outlandish revelations were disclosed. She sued Howard University for discrimination when she attended college because she was white. She disavowed her parents, who look just like her, claiming she had never had her DNA taken, so how would she know if they were her real parents? What truly silenced the story was the reality of being black: the Charleston killings knocked her from the front page, the “Today Show” and social media. The sad, ugly details of that church meeting are played and replayed through our televisions.

Reality vs. Fascination

We have met the nine black people, who may have liked the option to identify with another race in the moment they were gunned down. What if despite their brown skin and lovely faces, they had been able to “self-identify” as white, just for that minute? The killer chose that church because he did not want to mistakenly kill any white people. He only wanted to kill those churchgoing people, because he believed that he had lost America, (not his failing out of junior high and living in his car) because black people rape white women and are taking over America. Not that any of that was happening in the church that night, by the way.

Author Tamara Winfrey Harris explained in an editorial for The New York Times that black people don’t have the option of choosing their race. Blackness is like gravity: You can’t escape it. You are who you are, which is why learning to love your culture so deeply is a no-brainer. Ms. Harris explains that in the United States, one drop of black blood disqualified otherwise white-looking people from being white. If you have a black ancestor, no matter what color you were, you were black. As a good friend of mine suggested, our president is half-black, but because of his color President Obama is unable to self-identify as white. He is, Bill Clinton notwithstanding, our first black president.

The Privilege

The one-drop rule, Ms. Harris wrote, protected racial privilege. The United States did not want the wrong people to think they could have the same privileges as white people. She explains the Racial Integrity Act passed in 1924 defined white people as people who were “entirely white, having no known mixed blood…”

Ms. Harris ends by stating that Ms. Dolezal’s shifting racial perception is in itself white privilege. Her remarks end with, “I will accept Ms. Dolezal as black like me only when society can accept me as white like her.”

It doesn’t work, does it?

My final takeaway is that we should not “pass” over (pun intended) Ms. Dolezal’s slight of face even if she in fact is fighting for disenfranchised people for the very reason her made-up story undermines her efforts. As Albert Einstein said, “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”

Janice P. Brown is the founder and senior partner in the Brown Law Group in San Diego.

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