Former NBA MVP turned Time columnist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar came to Rachel Dolezal's defense even though she, a white woman, pretended to be black for years, sued for racial discrimination in the past, and even became president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP until her resignation Monday.

But for Abdul-Jabbar, none of that matters, because in his mind, she can pretend to be black if she wants. He writes:

Despite all this, you can’t deny that Dolezal has proven herself a fierce and unrelenting champion for African-Americans politically and culturally. Perhaps some of this sensitivity comes from her adoptive black siblings. Whatever the reason, she has been fighting the fight for several years and seemingly doing a first-rate job. Not only has she led her local chapter of the NAACP, she teaches classes related to African-American culture at Eastern Washington University and is chairwoman of a police oversight committee monitoring fairness in police activities. Bottom line: The black community is better off because of her efforts.

Before offering Dolezal this full-throated defense, Abdul-Jabbar began his piece with an odd tongue-in-cheek "revelation" which seemed to poke more fun at her than it dared defend. He opened by revealing his "true identity:"

I too have been living a lie. For the past 50 years I’ve been keeping up this public charade, pretending to be something I’m not. Finally, in the wake of so many recent personal revelations by prominent people, I’ve decided to come out with the truth.

I am not tall (#shortstuff).

Although I’ve been claiming to be 7’2” for many decades, the truth is that I’m 5’8”. And that’s when I first get out of bed in the morning. Just goes to show, you tell a lie often enough and people believe you. I expect there will be some who will demand I give back the championship rings and titles that I accumulated during my college and professional basketball career because I was only able to win them by convincing other players that they had no chance against my superior height. How could these achievements have any lasting meaning if I’m not really as tall as Wikipedia says I am?

All jokes aside, the basketball legend was comfortable equating Dolezal's preferred ethnic identity as no different from Bruce Jenner's preferred gender identity.

To bolster his point, Abdul-Jabbar points to science - or at least, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which in the 1950s claimed that race is just a social construct used for distinguishing groups, and not scientific at all. However, even he admits that he will still use classifications of race "for the sake of communication... in order to discuss our social issues so everyone understands them." (He has proven this through his many other columns in which he discusses police brutality, Freddie Gray, et al.)

"Since there is no such thing as race," he writes, "[Dolezal has] merely selected a cultural preference of which cultural group she most identifies with." After all, he reasons, "Who can blame her? Anyone who listens to the Isaac Hayes song, 'Shaft,' wants to be black—for a little while anyway."

And for a last-ditch defense, Abdul-Jabbar summoned MLK's famous line about judging the content of people's character, not the color of their skin. And though he agrees that Dolezal's lies were perhaps "a deficit in character," it doesn't really matter in the end:

"[T]he fight for equality is too important to all Americans to lose someone as passionate as she is and who has accomplished as much as she has. This seems more a case of her standing up and saying, “I am Spartacus!” rather than a conspiracy to defraud. Let’s give her a Bill Clinton Get Out of Jail Free card on this one (#Ididnothavesex) and let her get back to doing what she clearly does exceptionally well—making America more American.