Black or White? Rachel Dolezal, NAACP President in Spokane, Accused of Lying About Her Race

This story's getting heavy mainstream news coverage.

At the New York Times, "Black or White? Woman’s Story Stirs Up a Furor":

She has professed an affinity for black people since she was a teenager, when her parents adopted four black children. She chose a college where she could immerse herself in racial issues. She married a black man and built a reputation as an advocate for civil rights.

Rachel A. Dolezal would hardly be the first person to embrace a racial identity she was not born or raised in, but a rare twist in her story has suddenly turned her into a subject of national debate. Ms. Dolezal, president of her local N.A.A.C.P. chapter and a university instructor in African-American studies, has claimed for years that her heritage is partly black.

And that, her parents say, is a lie.

“She’s clearly our birth daughter, and we’re clearly Caucasian — that’s just a fact,” Lawrence A. Dolezal said in an interview from his home in Montana on Friday. “She is a very talented woman, doing work she believes in. Why can’t she do that as a Caucasian woman, which is what she is?” Ms. Dolezal did not respond to numerous phone calls, emails or knocks on her door in Spokane, Wash., on Friday, but the allegation lit up the Internet, fueled by Ms. Dolezal’s apparent refusal to give a direct answer about her racial background, and by family photos of her as a blue-eyed teenager with straight blond hair.

Ms. Dolezal, 37, quickly became a punch line on Twitter, the subject of countless barbed one-liners. But she also touched off a fierce Internet debate over the nature of race and racial categorization in America today, with commenters black and white, liberal and conservative, finding meaning in her story.

“The reason that her story is so fascinating to me and to the rest of the world is that it exposes in a disquieting way that our race is performance — that, despite the stark differences in how our races are perceived and privileged (or not) by others, they are all predicated on a myth that the differences are intrinsic and intrinsically perceptible,” wrote Steven W. Thrasher, a columnist for The Guardian.

Blacks and liberals accused Ms. Dolezal of an offensive impersonation, part of a long history in which whites appropriated black heritage when it suited them. Jonathan Capehart wrote in The Washington Post, “Blackface remains highly racist, no matter how down with the cause a white person is.” Others noted that for her, unlike black people, casting off the advantages of whiteness was a choice. “I wonder what race Rachel would become if she got stopped by the police?” the author Terry McMillan wrote on Twitter.

But many conservative commentators accused liberals of hypocrisy for accepting Caitlyn Jenner as a woman, but not Ms. Dolezal as black. “So, to recap, if Rachel Dolezal says she is a man, we must all agree, on pain of being publicly censured,” Rod Dreher wrote in The American Conservative. “But if Rachel Dolezal says she is black, it is fair game to challenge her claim.”

In National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke wrote that “lies are not necessarily delusions, and it is possible that Dolezal is just a good old-fashioned fabricator,” but he predicted that people on the left would eventually come to her defense.

American history is full of tales of partly black people “passing” as white, trying to shed the burdens of an oppressed people, but doing the reverse is much rarer. A recent study of census data by Yale researchers says that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as many as one-fifth of American black men posed as white at some point in their lives.

Faking a racial history, in either direction, raises difficult questions about what race is and why it matters, and about the assumptions people make.

Jim Crow laws often imposed a “one-drop rule” so that people with even a sliver of black ancestry, no matter how white they appeared, were legally considered black. It is only because of that history that Ms. Dolezal could be accepted as black, said Martha A. Sandweiss, a history professor of Princeton University.

“There was very little to be gained by identifying yourself as black, so if you did, no one questioned it,” said Ms. Sandweiss, author of “Passing Strange,” an acclaimed book about a man who did just that in the late 19th century. “It shows how absurd racial classifications often are.”

There have been other examples of white people living as black, in American history and culture, but not many...

More.