Rachel Dolezal
The infamous “race faker” appears in a new doc premiering at SXSW about Black beauty to weigh in on being forced into a “white mold” and needing to have a “respectable white butt.”
Common to these scams is a willful displacement of Black people in positions of visibility, influence, and power.
Two and a half years ago, ‘Yi-Fen Chou’ outed himself as Michael Derrick Hudson. Hudson has been silent ever since.
Rachel Dolezal is claiming that her ‘race fluidity’ is just like being transgender. It is not, and she should be challenged every time she says it.
She shouldn’t have lied, and of course she can’t really ‘be’ black. But if she wants to be culturally black, why can’t she?
With her Today appearance, Rachel Dolezal seems determined to appropriate not just blackness but the rhetoric of transgender identity as well. Even more troubling: she’s getting away with it.
Dave Chappelle and others have come out and said the white woman who claimed to be black deserves our sympathy. But what she did is culturally egregious and dangerous.