Black on White

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.