Rachel Dolezal was the head of the Spokane NAACP who'd been posing as a black woman until a news channel outed her in June 2015. On camera, the crew asked her this very simple question: “Are you African American?” The easy, correct response would've been "Um... no," but Dolezal was suspiciously flustered and evasive. In fact, the above photo shows Dolezal now (on the left) and as a child (growing up in Montana). When these earlier photos of the very white Dolezal emerged, her deception quickly became an internet sensation. Dolezal had posed as a black woman for so many years that she was absolutely shocked when the rest of America didn't buy her race-is-fluid mantra. She said:
“I feel that I was born with the essential essence of who I am, whether it matches my anatomy and complexion or not,” Dolezal said. “I’ve never questioned being a girl or a woman, for example, but whiteness has always felt foreign to me, for as long as I can remember. I didn’t choose to feel this way or be this way, I just am.
“What other choice is there than to be exactly who we are?”
Unless, I guess if "who you are" -- like Dolezal -- is white. And now this:
Dolezal has penned a memoir in which she compares her travails to slavery and describes her harrowing childhood as a pale, blond girl growing up poor on the side of a Montana mountain.
As she toiled in the garden for her strict, Evangelical parents, she’d dream of freeing her inner blackness, Dolezal writes in “In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World.”
See, she’d read her grandmother’s National Geographic magazines. So she knew about blackness.
“I’d stir the water from the hose into the earth … and make thin, soupy mud, which I would then rub on my hands, arms, feet, and legs,” Dolezal writes.
“I would pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo … imagining I was a different person living in a different place was one of the few ways … that I could escape the oppressive environment I was raised in.”
As Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds wrote, "So, basically, she’s guilty of cultural appropriation."
Exactly. Liberals freak out over small so-called infractions like Halloween costumes that borrow too heavily from other cultures. Dolezal lied on her job applications -- checking "African American" as her ethnicity -- and even posted photos of her African American parents... who weren't even her parents. Surely, America can rally around the fact that Dolezal's identity crisis is not something to be celebrated. It should be something which both Democrats and Republicans can agree is a deception.
