By Florida Bill Ms. Rachel Dolezal has said in an interview that she is "Transracial." She is definitely breaking new ground for celebration by the progressive crowd.
Ms. Dolezal is the 39-year-old woman with the wild, tangled Afro and the confident demeanor, who was forced to resign as president of the Spokane Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) after her parents revealed that she was, in fact, a White woman.
This is a real twist and so the acronym LGBTQ will need to be amended in some way to include individuals who "trans" race. (Perhaps a capital "TR" could now follow the "Q.") Dolezal has claimed in a recent interview that the phenomenon of "transracialing" is a twin sister to transgendering. Ethnicity, she said, is not biological.
Ms. Dolezal is the author of a new book, "In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World." In CNN and other interviews, she indicated she feels that she has been misunderstood. Yes, she is a civil rights leader, she argues, but never identified herself as African American. "I've identified as Black.... and Black is a culture, a philosophy, a political and social view," she asserted. She urges that critics who are filled with hate should read her book with an open mind.
Born in Montana of White parents, she earned a bachelors degree and later a master of fine arts from Howard University, a predominantly Black school where she assumed the persona of a Black woman, though she may have never stated her race formally. One person who knew her said that she did not pose as a black woman; it was simply assumed that she was black. She sounded Black particularly when she spoke on the telephone, one person observed.
Dolezal also has compared her situation to that of a transgender individual, such as Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympian who transitioned from male to female in 2015. People should not be defined by who or what they were at birth. "Race is a Social Construct," she declared
A glib talker, she went about her activities in the African American community, attending rallies and participating in forums. She spoke often and her prominence grew, and she rose to become the president of an energetic chapter of the Washington state NAACP. Her difficulties exploded when her parents revealed that she was masquerading as Black, and that she was their child and they were pure Caucasians of Czech, German and Swedish origin.
She was fired from her NAACP leadership position and lost her job as a teacher of Black history. She was booed when she tried to deliver a lecture and well--old friends quit calling. She even changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo which is said to have the meaning of "Gift of God" in west Africa territory. The new name was designed to recapture her standing and to explain her transitioning from white skin to inner blackness, although that physically she retained the outward characteristics of a Caucasian. Nevertheless, she remained the butt of jokes. Currently, she is on food stamps unable to find another job.
Back in the 1940s, there was the movie, "Pinky," which told the story of light-skinned Afro-American woman who passed for being Caucasian as she worked and studied to become a registered nurse. She fell in love with a white doctor, admitted her deception, and somehow the whole thing had a happy ending.
Rachel Dolezal's story is sort of a twist on the "Pinky" screen story--but without a happy ending. She pretended to be Black and blended into that culture, marrying an African American man, and rising to a respected leadership role with the NAACP on the west coast and even nationally. But instead of gaining status and understanding after being "outed" with her true skin color becoming known, her associates in the Black community and elsewhere dumped her and saw her as sort of a white "loon."
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