The issue of Rachel Dolezal
living successfully in the world as a black woman opens up all kinds of
intriguing questions. It may seem cut and dried on the surface, I mean, she is
NOT of African-American heritage, and that is irrefutable. I am so Northern-European
white that I don’t tan, my freckles simply connect – yet somewhere in my
genetic background there exist some American Indian genes, and who knows what
other genetic mish-mash. Do I get to claim membership in that tribe and
collect some percentage of their tax-free gambling income? If someone
surgically alters him or herself to look like another race, is that different
from surgically altering themselves to become another gender? Must we accept
Bruce Jenner as a woman, then? What if he had decided to re-pigment his skin
and adjust his eyes to look like an Asian person, and call himself Seiko? Could
we then accept him as a geisha girl? Is race about how someone looks, their
genetic heritage, or how they “identify”, as Dolezai claims? She is expected to
give up every job she has ever held because she checked a box on employment
forms identifying herself as “black”. I say – in our melting pot of America,
where the line grows fuzzier every day between race, gender, religion and
sexuality – we are going to have to reach the point of accepting everyone as
what they believe and say they are, not what they appear to be on the thin,
delicate surface of the skin.
