So by now you may have seen the two-year-long, never-ending and bizarre story out of Spokane, Washington about the white woman, Rachel Dolezal, whose parents are descended only from Europeans and are certainly white, but who was the president of the local NAACP chapter, who is, incredibly, defending her.
According to the story, she had been pretending to be black, said that she had a degree from Howard University, and taught "Africana Studies [sic]" at Eastern Washington University. Yes, to you and to my spell-check, that's the name of the course. When asked directly by a reporter "Are you African-American", she answered "I don't understand the question" and walked away.
This all has been a fascinating exercise in dashing around the whole PC fun world. If being black is so wonderful that someone would pretend to be black -- to the point of going to Howard, marrying (and divorcing) a black guy, getting a job with the NAACP and teaching "Africana Studies [sic]", then how do we deal with that?
Do we deal with it the same way that we deal with Bruce Jenner, who is a male human but has declared himself to be female, and intends for the rest of us to regard him that way?
Are we, who like her very confused parents in Montana, look at Rachel Dolezal as the white woman she always was and ask "Duh?", some kind of bigots (answer: the left will certainly find a way to make us bigots, so just go with "yes").
Is she different from Michael Jackson, who managed to grow from young black entertainer into a white adult somehow capable of siring Caucasian children? I have a degree in biology from M.I.T. and still can't figure that one out. I seem to recall that our general treatment of that facet of the King of Pop's life was to laugh very hard at it, and then buy more of his records. I also recall that I was more astonished that he could sire any children at all, let alone white ones.
But I digress.
More importantly, what do actual, genetically black people think when they read this? Are they happy that some certifiable nut-case in Spokane, Washington has decided that it's their race she wants to claim to be? Would they rather that she claim to be Vietnamese, or Maori, or Kalmyk? Would they prefer that if some white person is going to be out there claiming to be black, that it be someone else, like Mark McGwire or George Clooney or Kate Upton, and not Rachel Dolezal?
This one is not going to end well for Rachel. Since we all know that she is indeed quite white, she will have to deal not only with her ascent to the level of National Laughingstock, but with little things like falsification of government documents -- Spokane had to look at her application to be a member of the city's police oversight commission and decide whether to file charges, since she claimed to be black, or biracial, or something else contrary to fact, in her application.
But it is going to end up just wonderfully for me. First off, I have a column today that practically writes itself, not that I have to search the world that hard to find things to write about -- or laugh about. And as this story unfolds, and people can be relied upon to write and say immensely, superlatively stupid things as they scramble to decide how to react, I'm sure I will revisit it later -- two columns for the price of one. The gift that keeps on giving columns, sort of like Obamacare still does.
Most of all, I get to laugh at Rachel Dolezal doing, very seriously, what I actually did so many years ago, as I write about in this piece. Of course, I was not serious, and when I "became black", I did it for the money -- all eighty bucks and change that I got in the settlement, plus the right to say that a court has determined me to be adequately black to receive funds somehow from a race discrimination settlement. That is although racially I am, well, not adequately black to be called anything other than "white."
So let us all, who are immensely sick of political correctness, pour an icy Corona, sit back and observe as the left and their PC police tie themselves into knots no Boy Scout can name. We'll enjoy the scene as they try to decide whether Rachel Dolezal is a charlatan, a contemptible poseur, a heroine of racial wars, a white person, a black person, a post-racial something-or-other, more like Michael Jackson, or more like Bruce Jenner. Or more like me.
Because in the view of the left, she has to be something. They can't leave this one alone; it is too much of a teaching moment, if only they can tell us what the lesson is.
Either way, there are so few of us black white people. Welcome to the club, Rachel.
Copyright 2017, 2015 by Robert Sutton