This Rachel Dolezal situation is all sorts of fucked up (and hilarious imo). But since I heard about her, I can’t stop thinking about the history of white women trying to “pass” for black in order to co-opt the struggles black people faced, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance. I don’t recall any of them going to quite the same lengths as Dolezal, though Lillian Wood, author of “Let My People Go,” was believed to be a black woman for some time and just…never corrected anyone.
During the Harlem Renaissance, there was a pretty active group of white women who basically moved to Harlem and basically forced themselves into black social spaces, calling themselves “voluntary Negroes”. They made themselves “authorities” on black issues, collected black art and commissioned work from Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston for photos and papers on “authentic” black life, and in some cases, really did consider themselves to be black at heart: Nancy Cunard, “I speak as if I were a Negro myself,” and Charlotte Good Mason, “I am a better Negro than most of the Negroes I know.” (Mason would also make her patrons, including Hughes and Hurston, refer to her as “Godmother”.) This phenomena was discussed in Carla Kaplan’s needlessly empathetic book Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Harlem Renaissance, published in 2013, that more or less paints them as forward-thinking revolutionaries…
These women fetishized the experiences of black men and women to the point that they convinced themselves they intimately knew what it meant to be black–and even become black themselves. Because most of these women were wealthy and privileged, they exerted power over these black artists who were often just trying to make ends meet. Without their financial contributions, a lot of the work we enjoy from these writers especially would likely have not seen publication.
They used Harlem artists as textbooks and walked away with only the most basic, surface ideas of a “black identity” that was built on stereotypes. Similar, as I suspect, to Dolezal, this kind of mimicry has less to do with a genuine desire to aid the struggle for civil rights, and more to with a desire to enjoy “exotic” black culture while co-opting blacks’ oppression for their own purposes. I also feel that in many cases, this has to do with some white women/peoples’ issues of privilege and wanting to align themselves with oppressed minorities, so that they may claim that oppression for themselves and deny their own racial privilege.
There isn’t a ton of scholarship on the subject, unfortunately. (If anyone has addt’l links they want to add, please feel free.) I’m mostly going off of what I learned from an amazing professor I had, Autumn Womack, who taught us about the role white women had during the renaissance. I’ve linked to a video of her giving a lecture on the subject below; it’s definitely worth the watch.
Uptown Girls: “Miss Anne in Harlem” by Carla Kaplan -NYTimes
Women Without Race: Miss Anne in Harlem - The Daily Beast
The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance
Langston Hughes “Slave on the Block” from The Ways of White Folk
Artist Lecture Series - Autumn Womack [on White Patronage in the Harlem Renaissance]
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