Rachel Dolezal has three sons and they are black. That’s a fact.
Curiously, this information has been omitted in the truckloads of negative media that’s surrounded the writer and artist ever since she was outed as a white woman.
And it shouldn’t have been – because, for me, that information is a game changer.
I learned this detail about Dolezal’s sons whilst watching The Rachel Divide, a documentary by Laura Brownson that’s currently streaming on Netflix.
Dolezal, a prominent civil rights activist and former head of the Spokane National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, gained international notoriety in 2015 when she was outed by a local news reporter as biologically Caucasian, despite insisting she was black.
But saying that Dolezal claimed she was black when she wasn’t is a simplification of what happened. Dolezal asserted she had African heritage on her social media accounts, even claiming that the father-figure in her life – a black man – was her biological father. Dolezal changed her hair and make up to look more ‘typically’ African – and to disguise her white reality.
It was this concerted effort to mislead that gained the ire of the black community in her hometown of Spokane, and why her story attracted so much attention.
“Our daughter is Caucasian” say parents of Spokane NAACP President Rachel Dolezal. pic.twitter.com/6VHxm9v4Wt
— Taylor Viydo (@KREMTaylor) June 11, 2015
Top Comments
Why is the left upset with this woman ? I thought they now beleive you are whatever you "feel" like. Man, woman, non binary, 4 yrs old, makes no difference what you were born as they say now it's only what you "feel" like that counts.
So why do we put up with it when men claim to "feel" female or have a female brain and then transition to "woman" - claiming transwomen ARE women. Its exactly the same thing that Dolezal is trying to claim, except it is race and not sex. We tolerate and accept (and celebrate) without question, biological males' imposing their right to identify as women and gain access to women only spaces, women's sports, women's lists, women's scholarships, women's only political lists, insisting that they are entitled to define "womanhood" and "femininity", claiming its "violence" against them to deadname or even use the correct names for biological women's anatomical body parts, and when it is questioned we are labelled the slur "TERF" and subjected to harassment, doxxing, and real violence. But when this woman claims transracialism she is immediately vilified and condemned and criticised, and told this isn't possible from a social, cultural, experiential and biological standpoint. So how can we justify the increasing pervasiveness of transgenderism if we won't accept transracialism?
This is where my thinking has been of late, too.
Interesting take.
I had the same thought, yet still felt that race was different. I think there are 2 reasons they are different.
1 - there are hormones/body chemistry differences between genders, which I understand can be a big part of the feeling a disconnect with your body. This is not the same for race.
2 - many trans people refer to themselves as trans male/female - while I know this isn’t everyone, i personally believe this is a better description - it’s acknowledging that you are living as a female, however you were not born so, and therefore don’t have the same life experiences & challenges a cis-female has experienced (although you have many challenges that are unique to the trans population). With that in mind, if she had originally recognized as a “trans-africanerican” I could almost understand - but she didn’t, she pretended to be exactly the same.
I think it’s the pretending that I can’t agree with - rather than own & acknowledges her individual life challenges (of which she definitely has), she hid & tried to adopt the issues of others.
" hormones/body chemistry differences between genders" Nope, there are between the sexes. Gender is a social construct and all trans does is reinforce gender stereotypes.