Somebody, please tell me why? [View all]

Why, during Carter G. Woodson's Black History month, did I find a documentary about Rachel Dolezal on Netflix?!? I don't know how to feel about this mess. So, I thought I'd post an awesome article to put into words that which I can not.


Rachel Dolezal's claim that she is black is the whitest possible way to deal with her issues
The subject of Netflix new documentary simply can't admit fault for the harm that she's caused black people.

May 6, 2018, 1:29 AM PDT
By Syreeta McFadden, English professors and cultural commentator

The new Netflix documentary, "The Rachel Divide," seeks to explore the identity of Rachel Dolezal, the erstwhile Spokane NAACP chapter president who was, in a viral 2015 video, outed as a daily practitioner of blackface. But what the documentary and its subject fail to fully explore isn't her embrace of black identity, but just how white that embrace really is.

Dolezal’s insistence on maintaining an African American identity that she somehow believes she’s earned the right to claim — despite the protestations from the very community from whom she seeks kinship — has a strange rhetorical kinship with white people who insist that they have the right to use the n-word because of their proximity to blackness. The modern Miss Anne rigidly resists interrogating her own whiteness and the construct of whiteness that has shaped her, confounding viewers and even the black people who love her, unconsciously mirroring her white foremothers from the Harlem Renaissance who couldn't reconcile their post-racial ideals with their learned racism. Dolezal's surface interest in the harm this country does to African Americans has given way to a more full-throated expression of her interest in the harm done to her; she isn’t interested in truth nor reconciliation because she is still ill-equipped to fully reconcile and heal from her own pain.

Full article at link. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/rachel-dolezal-s-claim-she-black-whitest-possible-way-deal-ncna871656