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| Rachel Dolezal isn't alone – my family history proves choosing a racial definition is hard | |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| How do you determine who is black? Is it simply a matter of inheritance – you are what your parents are? Does having a black grandparent make a person black? Must she have been raised as black, in a black community? Is one black ancestor, one drop of blood, enough? | How do you determine who is black? Is it simply a matter of inheritance – you are what your parents are? Does having a black grandparent make a person black? Must she have been raised as black, in a black community? Is one black ancestor, one drop of blood, enough? |
| These were the kinds of questions asked during the legal trials undertaken in the late 19th and early 20th century throughout southern and midwestern US states, to determine a person’s “true” racial identity. Then, as now, ancestry trumped lived experience. In Ohio the courts ruled that having 50% black ancestry, a single black parent or two mixed parents, made a person black – and hence socially and politically inferior – while in Louisiana, the “one drop” rule prevailed, and any traceable amount of Negro ancestry denied one certain legal rights, including the right to vote and the right to marry a person of another race. | These were the kinds of questions asked during the legal trials undertaken in the late 19th and early 20th century throughout southern and midwestern US states, to determine a person’s “true” racial identity. Then, as now, ancestry trumped lived experience. In Ohio the courts ruled that having 50% black ancestry, a single black parent or two mixed parents, made a person black – and hence socially and politically inferior – while in Louisiana, the “one drop” rule prevailed, and any traceable amount of Negro ancestry denied one certain legal rights, including the right to vote and the right to marry a person of another race. |
| Related: Rachel Dolezal exposes our delusional constructions and perceptions of race | Steven W Thrasher | Related: Rachel Dolezal exposes our delusional constructions and perceptions of race | Steven W Thrasher |
| It was possible to be legally white in one state and legally black in an adjacent one. The line dividing racial categories has never been a clear or constant one. It takes someone trying to cross that line to illuminate its current coordinates. | It was possible to be legally white in one state and legally black in an adjacent one. The line dividing racial categories has never been a clear or constant one. It takes someone trying to cross that line to illuminate its current coordinates. |
| According to her parents, Rachel Dolezal, the chapter head of the Spokane NAACP, is “biologically” white, with perhaps “a small trace” of American Indian ancestry. Her parents have released photographs showing her to be a blonde, blue-eyed, white teenage girl. But throughout her adult life, Dolezal has taken on a black identity. Consequently, to some commentators, Dolezal is a self-tanning, hair-frizzing fraud, knowingly masquerading as black, a hideous contemporary version of blackface minstrel. To others she is a mentally ill wannabe mesmerized by the idea of victimization. Some have compared her to Caitlyn Jenner, suggesting that racial affiliation, like gender affiliation, is a question of what one feels oneself to be. | According to her parents, Rachel Dolezal, the chapter head of the Spokane NAACP, is “biologically” white, with perhaps “a small trace” of American Indian ancestry. Her parents have released photographs showing her to be a blonde, blue-eyed, white teenage girl. But throughout her adult life, Dolezal has taken on a black identity. Consequently, to some commentators, Dolezal is a self-tanning, hair-frizzing fraud, knowingly masquerading as black, a hideous contemporary version of blackface minstrel. To others she is a mentally ill wannabe mesmerized by the idea of victimization. Some have compared her to Caitlyn Jenner, suggesting that racial affiliation, like gender affiliation, is a question of what one feels oneself to be. |
| Since 1970, Americans have been allowed to “self-identify” on the federal census, which serves as the source for other federal- and state-mandated definitions of race. Yet, since its inception in 1790, the census has never defined the categories and definitions for race the same way. The 2000 census, for example, saw the addition of an option to check more than one box when identifying one’s race, where before a respondent was forced to chose one category. | Since 1970, Americans have been allowed to “self-identify” on the federal census, which serves as the source for other federal- and state-mandated definitions of race. Yet, since its inception in 1790, the census has never defined the categories and definitions for race the same way. The 2000 census, for example, saw the addition of an option to check more than one box when identifying one’s race, where before a respondent was forced to chose one category. |
| Related: I became a black woman in Spokane. But, Rachel Dolezal, I was a black girl first | Alicia Walters | Related: I became a black woman in Spokane. But, Rachel Dolezal, I was a black girl first | Alicia Walters |
| My own family history provides an instructive example of the difficultly of choosing a consistent racial definition across a changing cultural and legal landscape. | My own family history provides an instructive example of the difficultly of choosing a consistent racial definition across a changing cultural and legal landscape. |
| While my mother is of Norwegian descent with some trace Native American ancestry, my father’s parents were both mixed-raced Creoles, of French, Native American and African descent. In New Orleans, where my father was born in 1920, he and his family were considered legally “colored”. After they moved to Brooklyn in 1927 as part of the Great Migration, they, along with many light-skinned black people, passed as white to find work, meaning they avoided being seen by their employers with their darker-skinned daughter and didn’t mention where they lived lest it raise questions about coming from a black part of town. My grandmother passed as white to work as a laundress, as did my grandfather in order to join the carpenter’s union. | While my mother is of Norwegian descent with some trace Native American ancestry, my father’s parents were both mixed-raced Creoles, of French, Native American and African descent. In New Orleans, where my father was born in 1920, he and his family were considered legally “colored”. After they moved to Brooklyn in 1927 as part of the Great Migration, they, along with many light-skinned black people, passed as white to find work, meaning they avoided being seen by their employers with their darker-skinned daughter and didn’t mention where they lived lest it raise questions about coming from a black part of town. My grandmother passed as white to work as a laundress, as did my grandfather in order to join the carpenter’s union. |
| My father, growing up among aspiring Brooklyn immigrants, chose to try to define himself on his own terms, in part for philosophical reasons and in part simply to get ahead in life. He became a writer and was eventually hired in 1971 as the daily book critic for the New York Times. Whether his employers knew of his “true” racial identification is unclear. They didn’t ask, and my father didn’t tell. | My father, growing up among aspiring Brooklyn immigrants, chose to try to define himself on his own terms, in part for philosophical reasons and in part simply to get ahead in life. He became a writer and was eventually hired in 1971 as the daily book critic for the New York Times. Whether his employers knew of his “true” racial identification is unclear. They didn’t ask, and my father didn’t tell. |
| Neither did he tell my brother and me, and it fell upon my mother to break the news as my dad lay dying from prostate cancer in 1990. She says that she bugged him for years to tell us, but he would always assert to her that we were white. We looked white and grew up white. My father’s ancestry didn’t matter. | Neither did he tell my brother and me, and it fell upon my mother to break the news as my dad lay dying from prostate cancer in 1990. She says that she bugged him for years to tell us, but he would always assert to her that we were white. We looked white and grew up white. My father’s ancestry didn’t matter. |
| We looked white and grew up white. My father’s ancestry didn’t matter | We looked white and grew up white. My father’s ancestry didn’t matter |
| I was 23 years old when I learned of my dad’s background, after I had grown up in a neighborhood in Connecticut that had an even smaller black population than Spokane’s, which at most recent count is 2.2%. I had nary a black classmate when I set to figuring out what the revelation of my father’s blackness meant to me. | I was 23 years old when I learned of my dad’s background, after I had grown up in a neighborhood in Connecticut that had an even smaller black population than Spokane’s, which at most recent count is 2.2%. I had nary a black classmate when I set to figuring out what the revelation of my father’s blackness meant to me. |
| On the face of it, my father had successfully made me, and my brother, white. | On the face of it, my father had successfully made me, and my brother, white. |
| I hadn’t experienced the day-to-day discrimination and humiliation that for some African American commentators on the Dolezal case define as the black experience; as Slate columnist Jamelle Bouie puts it: “She is adopting the culture without carrying the burdens.” | I hadn’t experienced the day-to-day discrimination and humiliation that for some African American commentators on the Dolezal case define as the black experience; as Slate columnist Jamelle Bouie puts it: “She is adopting the culture without carrying the burdens.” |
| Yet as I dug deeper into his history and the history of African Americans and met the family members who had been kept from me – starting with my two aunts and first cousin, at my dad’s memorial service – my perspective began to shift away from the “white” one I grew up with. As a result, I started to view myself differently: as a woman with mixed-race ancestry. Then, in 1996, less than six years after I learned of my father’s African ancestry, Henry Louis Gates wrote a long profile about my dad in the New Yorker, effectively outing him to the world as “black”, and other people began viewing me differently as well. People I had known all my life began searching my face for signs of blackness, claiming they could see it in my nose or in the shape of my brow. | Yet as I dug deeper into his history and the history of African Americans and met the family members who had been kept from me – starting with my two aunts and first cousin, at my dad’s memorial service – my perspective began to shift away from the “white” one I grew up with. As a result, I started to view myself differently: as a woman with mixed-race ancestry. Then, in 1996, less than six years after I learned of my father’s African ancestry, Henry Louis Gates wrote a long profile about my dad in the New Yorker, effectively outing him to the world as “black”, and other people began viewing me differently as well. People I had known all my life began searching my face for signs of blackness, claiming they could see it in my nose or in the shape of my brow. |
| Related: Race v ethnicity: the curious case of Rachel Dolezal, explained (sort of) | Related: Race v ethnicity: the curious case of Rachel Dolezal, explained (sort of) |
| Though I had yet to write about my dad’s racial identity or publicly claim a mixed-race identity, my first book, My Father, Dancing, a collection of short stories that didn’t deal with racial subjects or feature non-white characters, was repeatedly regarded as if written by a black woman. My book was reviewed in the African American general interest magazine Emerge, and featured in an African American book expo. | Though I had yet to write about my dad’s racial identity or publicly claim a mixed-race identity, my first book, My Father, Dancing, a collection of short stories that didn’t deal with racial subjects or feature non-white characters, was repeatedly regarded as if written by a black woman. My book was reviewed in the African American general interest magazine Emerge, and featured in an African American book expo. |
| There was a particularly awkward phone conversation with the producer of a staged reading series in Chicago who wanted to feature one of my stories alongside work by Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston. The event was scheduled for February. I was flattered to share the bill with such esteemed writers, but worried that the audience would feel cheated by my inclusion. Couldn’t they find a “real” black writer to use instead? | There was a particularly awkward phone conversation with the producer of a staged reading series in Chicago who wanted to feature one of my stories alongside work by Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston. The event was scheduled for February. I was flattered to share the bill with such esteemed writers, but worried that the audience would feel cheated by my inclusion. Couldn’t they find a “real” black writer to use instead? |
| People I had known all of my life began searching my face for signs of blackness | |
| As I set off on a publicity tour for my second book, One Drop, about my father’s and his family history and the history of racial identification in the United States, I steeled myself for someone, most likely African American, to challenge my right to claim a (partly) black identity. To my surprise, it was the white audience members who questioned my embrace of my newly discovered heritage. | As I set off on a publicity tour for my second book, One Drop, about my father’s and his family history and the history of racial identification in the United States, I steeled myself for someone, most likely African American, to challenge my right to claim a (partly) black identity. To my surprise, it was the white audience members who questioned my embrace of my newly discovered heritage. |
| I live differently than I might have had I never discovered my father’s racial ancestry. | I live differently than I might have had I never discovered my father’s racial ancestry. |
| My kids (one of whom is blonde, the other with dark hair and an olive complexion) know they are part black, and regularly see their darker-skinned cousins. My Sephardic Jewish husband and I chose to raise our family in a neighborhood where the classroom, the playground and the public swimming pool weren’t always only filled with white people, as they were in my own childhood. On the street of my mixed Brooklyn neighborhood, however, I’m sometimes perceived as just another white gentrifier – despite the fact that I’m living in the same neighborhood where my “colored” and “passing” father lived 70 years ago. | My kids (one of whom is blonde, the other with dark hair and an olive complexion) know they are part black, and regularly see their darker-skinned cousins. My Sephardic Jewish husband and I chose to raise our family in a neighborhood where the classroom, the playground and the public swimming pool weren’t always only filled with white people, as they were in my own childhood. On the street of my mixed Brooklyn neighborhood, however, I’m sometimes perceived as just another white gentrifier – despite the fact that I’m living in the same neighborhood where my “colored” and “passing” father lived 70 years ago. |
| Since the publication of my second book One Drop, I have heard from hundreds of people who similarly discovered later in life a previously unknown ancestry, some of whom have had their sense of themselves changed, seemingly overnight, as a result. Sometimes the revelation came as the result of a DNA test, which was then corroborated with some genealogical research. Other times, the discovery of a “MU” (Mulatto) or “B” (Black) on a grandparent’s or great grandparent’s census record had uncovered the truth. With cheaper genetic testing and more and more genealogical records easily searchable online, the number of people discovering they are not what they thought they were will only continue to increase. | Since the publication of my second book One Drop, I have heard from hundreds of people who similarly discovered later in life a previously unknown ancestry, some of whom have had their sense of themselves changed, seemingly overnight, as a result. Sometimes the revelation came as the result of a DNA test, which was then corroborated with some genealogical research. Other times, the discovery of a “MU” (Mulatto) or “B” (Black) on a grandparent’s or great grandparent’s census record had uncovered the truth. With cheaper genetic testing and more and more genealogical records easily searchable online, the number of people discovering they are not what they thought they were will only continue to increase. |
| Still, to regard the results of a DNA cheek swab or a search on Ancestry.com as more meaningful to one’s sense of self than the sum of a person’s experiences (which, in Dolezal’s case, involves marrying an African American man, working on behalf of causes important to the black community and counting four adopted black siblings as family) is, to my mind, no less ridiculous than applying self-tanner and sporting an ethnic hairdo to change how people see you. | Still, to regard the results of a DNA cheek swab or a search on Ancestry.com as more meaningful to one’s sense of self than the sum of a person’s experiences (which, in Dolezal’s case, involves marrying an African American man, working on behalf of causes important to the black community and counting four adopted black siblings as family) is, to my mind, no less ridiculous than applying self-tanner and sporting an ethnic hairdo to change how people see you. |
| I have had my ancestral admixture tested four times, and each time the results have been different | I have had my ancestral admixture tested four times, and each time the results have been different |
| In fact, DNA tests are fallible too. I have had my ancestral admixture tested four times over the past 15 years – twice at my own request during the writing of my book, and twice by Henry Louis Gates, in connection to his PBS show African American Lives (now called Finding Your Roots) – and each time the results have been different. The first time I had no evidence of any sub-Saharan ancestry, much to the horror of my literary agent who had secured me a contract to write about my father’s racial passing; it climbed to 13% during a retest. During my appearance on Gates’s show, it was all the way up to 18.9%, which had him joking that I was getting blacker by the year; then, during a recent retest requested by Gates after further refinement of the science, it was down to 5.7%. | In fact, DNA tests are fallible too. I have had my ancestral admixture tested four times over the past 15 years – twice at my own request during the writing of my book, and twice by Henry Louis Gates, in connection to his PBS show African American Lives (now called Finding Your Roots) – and each time the results have been different. The first time I had no evidence of any sub-Saharan ancestry, much to the horror of my literary agent who had secured me a contract to write about my father’s racial passing; it climbed to 13% during a retest. During my appearance on Gates’s show, it was all the way up to 18.9%, which had him joking that I was getting blacker by the year; then, during a recent retest requested by Gates after further refinement of the science, it was down to 5.7%. |
| Of course I understand why Dolezal’s performance of blackness offends many people who have suffered and continue to suffer negative consequences for being visibly African American – consequences that are arguably even worse than being publicly humiliated (and by one’s parents) for “passing” as black. | Of course I understand why Dolezal’s performance of blackness offends many people who have suffered and continue to suffer negative consequences for being visibly African American – consequences that are arguably even worse than being publicly humiliated (and by one’s parents) for “passing” as black. |
| Since the Dolezal story has exploded in the media, Twitter hashtags and clickbait articles seem to imply that it is easy to determine who is black and white. But the truth is, the answer is not as simple as we might think. | Since the Dolezal story has exploded in the media, Twitter hashtags and clickbait articles seem to imply that it is easy to determine who is black and white. But the truth is, the answer is not as simple as we might think. |
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