Rachel Dolezal: Racial Identity and Cultural Appropriation

The idea that a Caucasian woman in the United States would try to pass herself as black is laughable, especially in the light of recent events such as the McKinney incident, yet Rachel Dolezal has done exactly that. The president of the Spokane, Washington NAACP chapter, Ms. Dolezal has masqueraded as a black woman for about eight years, and was recently outed by her parents.

There is more to her lie than just claiming a (false) African-American ethnicity. In her Eastern Washington University professor biography, she claims to be a victim of eight racial hate crimes, which is untrue. It is sickening that she would claim victimhood when she has no firsthand experience of racial bias. By faking these racial hate crimes, she trivializes the true suffering of African Americans who have experienced the things that she lied about, including envelopes with death threats and nooses tied to trees. She has exploited African American struggles in order to further her own personal and professional gains.

Cultural appropriation is wrong, no matter how the person feels about the race that he/she is mimicking. Although Ms. Dolezal champions African-American rights, she does not have the power to assume that identity as her own. Assuming a racial identity comes with it the responsibility to bear the negative baggage that goes with it: racial discrimination, history of suffering, and stereotypes. She cannot truly know the struggles of being African American because she does not have slave ancestors and or suffer the effects of previous discriminatory government policies. A change in hairstyle and an overuse of bronzer does not make a white person black. By donning a stereotypical look of an African American, she is committing blackface, even if her intent is not to mock African Americans. Black people, who are discriminated by the police, media, and people in society for being black, do not get to be white just because they want to. When Ms. Dolezal appropriates a minority ethnicity, she is using her white privilege to take what is not her's to boost her own power. No matter the intentions behind her deception, her lie undermines the civil rights cause and propagates cultural appropriation of black heritage.