The spectrum of shades and colorings that constitute “black” identity in the United States, and the equal claim to black identity that someone who looks like White or Wright (or, for that matter, Dolezal) can have, is a direct product of bloodlines that attest to institutionalized rape during and after slavery. Nearly all of us who identify as African-American in this country, apart from some more recent immigrants, have at least some white ancestry. My own white great-grandparent is as inconsequential as the color of my palms in terms of my status as a black person in the United States. My grandparents had four children: my father and his brother, both almond-brown, with black hair and dark eyes, and two girls with reddish hair, fair skin, freckles, and gray eyes. All of them were equally black because they were equal heirs to the quirks of chance determining whether their ancestry from Europe or Africa was most apparent. Dolezal’s primary offense lies not in the silly proffering of a false biography but in knowing this ugly history and taking advantage of the reasons that she would, at least among black people, be taken at her word regarding her identity.
Race, in this country and under certain circumstances, functions like a faith, in that the simple profession of membership is sufficient. The most—possibly the sole—democratic element of race in this country lies in this ecumenical approach to blackness. We are not in the business of checking membership cards. In this way, Dolezal’s claim on black identity is of a different order than the hollow declaration of a Hollywood scion or anyone else who opted to be Negro for a season. They can plead ignorance. But Dolezal spent four years at an institution steeped in the delicacies of race. If nothing else, she understands the exact nature of the trust she violated.
Despite the interchangeability of the terms “African-American” and “black,” this is a community in which ancestry is one, but clearly not the sole or necessarily even the primary, basis for inclusion. Walter White was only fractionally more African than Dolezal, but black enough to be accepted as not only a member of that community but one of its leaders. There is also a disquieting notion inherent in this approach to identity—that if anyone can indeed be “black,” then we all are, that Morrison and Coltrane and Chisholm and Malcolm are both unhyphenated Americans and indistinct. (And yet, in circumstances where someone named Eric Garner or Walter Scott is looking nervously over his shoulder, they are still vulnerably intelligible.) It putatively means that Chet Haze is as qualified to utter the word “nigga” as anyone for whom dark skin and skewed life chances have given the word connotations Haze would never countenance. It means, most damningly, that black people are not distinctly bound to each other. Yet both of these things—a community rooted in race and a deep-seated skepticism about the very existence of race—coexist.
