Skip to main content

Black Like Me




No one likes to be punked, especially one's parents, who cried foul when their daughter had invented a rough and tumble family of her own to gain entry in the Spokane black community, where she quickly rose up the ladder to become the local head of the NAACP.   To hear her parents tell it, the last straw was when Rachel reported a "threatening package" to local police, which the post office challenged.

Her parents decided to pull the plug on their daughter's masquerade, providing photographs that showed she was white and described her heritage as primarily Czech.  It proved to be a tough blow for Rachel, who had to step down from her head post of the local NCAAP chapter amid all the furor surrounding this startling revelation.  She has managed to upstage Bruce, I mean Caitlyn Jenner, which is no small feat.

There have been no end of jokes at her expense, but some comics have chosen to leave Rachel alone.  Dave Chappelle simply doesn't want to go there, which is rare for him, saying it is too sensitive right now.  Of course that hasn't stopped the pundits of Fox News, who have had a field day with this story, leading Jon Stewart to offer one of his patented riffs on the hypocrisy of the news network.

Rev. Al is upset with Rachel's parents for not coming out sooner, having allowed this charade to go on as long as it did.  It doesn't seem to matter that by all accounts Ms. Dolezal was deeply committed to the NAACP.   Jamelle Bouie argues that she could have done the same as a white woman, she just wouldn't have been a "protagonist."   I guess this is what Rachel wanted to be -- a protagonist -- not just some well-meaning white woman.

Of course, the NAACP should have questioned her biography.  Not many persons grow up in teepees in Montana these days, not even Native Americans, which her parents conceded she may have some Indian blood.  She didn't even change her name, other than to take her black husband's surname Moore, since divorced.

Her backstory would have come out at some point, as she had a habit of drawing attention to herself, but I doubt she could have ever imagined her story would have exploded in the media the way it did, replete with memes on social network that manage to drag Liz Warren's faux native American heritage into it as well.

Ethnicity has become a thorny issue.  We've long heard stories of Blacks and Hispanics passing as White because it allowed them greater access to American society.  However, Affirmative Action purportedly changed all that, at least in the mind of conservative White America, which now railed against what it saw as "reverse discrimination."

Rachel was apparently a "victim" of this, claiming she was denied a teaching assistantship at Howard University on account of her skin color in a law suit.  She was white at the time, but had married a black fellow student Kevin Moore.  Apparently, this served as the turning point in her life, as she decided that the only way to be fully welcomed in the black community was to become black herself.

After the dust settles, I'm sure we will see a book along the lines of Black Like Me, in which John Howard Griffin donned black face to see how the other half lived in America.  Of course, he was praised for pulling the cover off Jim Crow South in the late 50s.  Rachel will have much more explaining to do, as hers hasn't been so much an undercover story as it has been a way to move within a community she apparently feels much more comfortable with.  Unfortunately for her, she has now lost the trust of that community and probably won't get it back anytime soon.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...