Do you remember, last year, when Rachel Dolezal, ex-head of the NAACP was reported to have lied about her race for most of her life? Do you remember feeling shocked and angry that she could do such a thing? I’ll bet you believed your anger was due to her lies. How could someone lie about being black and get away with it? Black people have to suffer every day with violence and microaggressions. How could she just flick a switch and change her race? More importantly, for a lot of people based on the articles I’ve read, the main discomfort lay within the why. Why would she want to suffer these same injustices?
Why does she even need to lie about her race to be head of the NAACP? Regardless of the answer, and without dredging up unnecessary Dolezal-related arguments (for she deserves no more of our time), I believe the real discomfort many felt lay far beneath the basic questions of why? And how could she? The true difficulty many had with the situation lay within race itself and how America has defined it.
Technically speaking, black people are not a unified race. Many slaves were carried over from all over Africa and they were forced to amalgamate with each other for sheer survival. Yet, the people were spread over an entire continent! How could they be the same? Well, they have unified over time.
The same happened for so-called white people. Granted, Europe isn’t exactly a true continent. However, white people also came from the Middle East. For a very long time, there was much discrimination against the Irish, Jews, Italians, and lots of other peoples. But that’s besides the point.
The point is that when white people were discriminated against, it was because the Anglo-Saxons or whomever learned the subtle differences in appearance of various white people. Those other, more southern white people didn’t get to pick whether or not they looked like that. I’m sure many a Frenchman was mistaken for a Jew.
And that’s the thing; the separate races weren’t based on biology. It doesn’t matter the history of each population. What matters in race is what the people look like. And race matters because of racism.
It’s an unending spiral of doom.
And yet, in the melting pot that America is today, we somehow stopped learning to tell the differences between white people because we don’t have to hold prejudice against them anymore. Not so with black people. That is the functionality of racism; it’s practically black and white (with turbans and hijabs nowadays).
There is the mentality that looking like one thing is better. It seems unnecessary to point out that that’s an illusion. I’m sure many black people have white in them because slave masters liked to rape them in the night way back when. But again, if they look black, then it’s over.
So when we have the case of Rachel Dolezal, we are upset because she has fooled us into thinking she looks black enough to pass for one of them. Even if you don’t think she looks like that, it seems outrageous that she even tried. After all, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in her book Americanah, “In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you.” People decide based on how you look, and the system keeps churning, for better or worse.
Since this racism depends on looks, it seems unnecessary to fuss over whether or not someone is biracial if they clearly pass for one or the other. People used to get upset when people said Obama is black; he is of course biracial or black-and-white, not simply black. Yes, his mother is white, but the dissection seems useless; Obama would have used the “colored” bathrooms 50 years ago, and he would have toiled away in the fields years before that, just as Frederick Douglass did. What if Douglass and Booker T. Washington defended themselves by saying they were part white?
On the flip side, biracial people who pass as white need to recognize their privilege. It’s annoying and unhelpful when people try to claim oppression by saying their aunt is black or their great-grandfather is Native American. Those people that are related to you struggled because of the way the looked. You, passing white person, do not. (Or at least not because of your race).
I know at least one person by name who has a more direct lineage (her father is black), but she completely passes as white. Yet, she never fails to make a condescending comment about white people or a claim that she’s struggled because of her race.
That racial struggle is made up because of the aforementioned reasons. She looks white, so she gets to be white in society. She has privilege. (Her main struggle is that she is a complete jerk most of the time, and I assume she gets much backlash in many forms. That issue has nothing to do with her race though).
In any case, since race isn’t biological, it’s becoming impossible to say who is what, so we humans have yet again made up reasons to meet the discriminatory quota of history. (I worked at a summer camp sponsored by the government, and I had to profile the kids’ races as a requirement to get the funding for the program. Needless to say, I had a really tough time). But before the social justice warriors get all upset about what I’m saying, I plead them to think about it. Think about the way racism and the system work. Now tell me looks aren’t at the base of it.
