Blurred Lines: Rachel Dolezal, #WrongSkin, & Passing
Rachel Dolezal, president of the Spokane, WA chapter of the NAACP, was recently “outed” as being white during a legal issue with her white parents. While all races are accepted as members and officers in the NAACP nationwide, Dolezal falsely identified on her application and has been living her life as a black woman since young adulthood. Her credibility is now in question as she is under investigation for allegedly fabricated hate mail and crimes she’s reported in addition to the elaborate background story she’s told the public from her platform.
Godfrey Elfwick, a notorious Twitter hoaxer, began the #WrongSkin campaign to promote the concept of being “transracial”/“born to the wrong race,” and that race is essentially a “state of mind.” While many scholars agree that race is a social construct, the idea of being able to go from one to another is largely known as “passing” in the United States.
Passing as a race different from the one you’re originally identified as has been explored deeply in the film The Imitation of Life (1959) and books such as The Bluest Eye (1970) and Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (1999). However, the subjects studied are often African-Americans passing for white, not the opposite. As cases of cultural appropriation and racially insensitive casting are increasingly recognized and debated in today’s society, it is hard to imagine that a person of whiteness would try to pass as black in daily life. Furthermore, in the current racial climate, it is hard to imagine that anyone would desire to carry the social, economic, and legal burdens that come with being African-American.
Which brings us to the issues of #WrongSkin: First, it is an inherently privileged status for white Americans to indulge in. By and large, most blacks could not pass as white and could certainly never claim #WrongSkin when facing racism. When pulled over, when entering our own homes, when attending a party or job interview, we could not claim #WrongSkin to an officer of the law to protect ourselves. We do not have the privilege of playing pretend when it comes to race and then going back to a reality without daily transgressions. To deny your race and identify with ours is to deny your white privilege and disregard our oppression.
Second, for those who claim to be “transracial” to state that they share the same racial struggle or suffer more than “naturally born” members of a racial/ethnic group is extremely condescending, insensitive, and ignorant. Anyone who claims to know the struggle of a group that has been historically and systematically marginalized and persecuted when that is not their lived experience is strongly misguided. There are many ways to ally oneself with the struggles and causes of others, and none of them require adopting their racial identity to bring about change in our society.
Finally, a large part of the debate to accept #WrongSkin and “transracial” identities comes on the heels of the media’s acceptance of Caitlyn Jenner as transgender. On the basis that someone can identify as another gender in the wrong body, several people are calling for acceptance for those identifying as a different race. This argument heavily discredits research on transgender brain development and gender studies as well as the progress in visibility the LGBTQI community has accomplished in the last several years. It makes a mockery of the ostracization and violence that the transgender community suffers, again from a place of privilege that protects #WrongSkin advocates and supporters.
So if being in the #WrongSkin and adopting our identity includes you dressing, speaking, and behaving “accordingly,” which I can only imagine is taken from mainstream media stereotypes, then your imitation is not a form of flattery. It is as disrespectful as any blackface performance, and you don’t have to be black to know how much we hate that.