Rachel Dolezal: Not Sorry for Who I Am

Rachel Dolezal became world famous on June 11, 2015 when a reporter asked her if her father was white.  This seemed like an odd question, why would anyone care?  Weirdly, people cared.  Rachel had been presenting herself as black for years but the reality was both her parents were white and so was she.  Rachel had constructed a public persona of a black woman, and it was believable.  She had photos of a black man she said was her dad, had two black children, and had worked tirelessly as an activist and president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP.  When the reporter outed her as white, her world came crumbling down.  Her friends felt betrayed, she lost her job, her volunteer positions, most of her family, her place in the community, her reputation - she lost everything.

 

Did she deserve it?  Was she a fraud?  Did she have a valid reason to claim membership to another racialized group? Is race biological or is it a social construct, made up by people?  Is race something that doesn't exist in nature and more importantly, does her refusal to apologize mean that she doesn't understand the issue - or that we don't?

 

We talk through the history of racism, the biological and social realities of "race", and consider the parallels between race and gender in this extra special edition of Apologies Accepted.