The case of Rachel Dolezal

In June 2015 the parents of Rachel Dolezal gave an interview with Good Morning America, the function of which was to emphasise that their daughter’s ethnicity was actually white. Ms Dolezal wears her hair in a loose perm and, arguably, cultivates a dark complexion. The resulting avalanche of corporate-media condemna tion directed at Ms Dolezal was in stark disproportion to her prominence in society. Ms Dolezal had been local president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP. After undertaking postgraduate study at Howard – historically a black university – she enjoyed some success as an academic and arts practitioner specialising in issues of marginalised black ethnic representation. Until her dismissal over the same June 2015 period, she had been chair of Spokane’s Police Ombudsman’s Commission, where she had acquired a reputation of being prickly and difficult – however, in a society of mass black incarceration and multiple African American deaths at the hands of the police, these are not necessarily the worst attributes to bring to this position. In terms of public profile, Ms Dolezal was hardly a significant party-political Bill Clinton-like scalp to be taken. Despite this, since the interview given by her parents, a great deal of the energies of the political Right and the corporate media have been expended in unseemly, speculative, long-distance psychoanalysis of Ms Dolezal’s character. For progressives, feminists and leftists, this type of pejorative, personality-based witch-hunt is not appropriate terrain, and the whole media storm should prompt a very different model of enquiry. A more pertinent query is: just what is it about the social and historical forces flowing through and around the locus of Ms Dolezal’s identity that the white mainstream establishment finds so threatening?