Kearston Farr comforts her daughter, Taliyah Farr, 5, as they stand in front of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church after a mass shooting at the church that killed nine people of June 19, 2015.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Much as Rachel Dolezal might want to bend race to her will, she has demonstrated just how volatile a concept it is when stoked by history and emotion.
Ms. Dolezal is the artist, some-time teacher and now past president of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Her parents assert she is a white woman masquerading as black. She says her strong identification with African-American culture allowed her to choose to be black – although she is reported to have once accused a university in a failed lawsuit of discriminating against her on matters of employment and academics because she was white.
It is a storm of confession and contradiction made for the Internet age, with material for sound-bite-ready point-scoring and just enough gravitas to allow bloggers to feel they are being socially conscious even if they are also revelling in rumours about Ms. Dolezal's complicated family. The reality-TV noise might just drown out a serious conversation about what remains among the most divisive of U.S. issues.
Appreciating or identifying with African-American culture does not "mean you can engage in misrepresentation and cause people to lose faith or confidence in you because of the lack of candour or honesty," Cornell Williams Brooks, president and CEO of the national NAACP, told MSNBC after Ms. Dolezal offered her definition of racial identity on NBC's Today Show. "Let's appreciate the culture," he added, "but let's not misappropriate it."
Ms. Dolezal had bristled at a suggestion from the show's host, Matt Lauer, that she had deceived anyone, but acknowledged she never corrected reports that she was black "because it's more complex than being true or false." But she added that given another chance, "there are probably a couple of interviews that I would do differently." Her mother has suggested Ms. Dolezal lied because she believed it would give her some advantage as a civil rights activist. That has led to questions about what else she may have lied about. The threatening, racist letters she has reported to police, perhaps?
Such questions of legitimacy are too often faced by black Americans who speak out about very real racism and discrimination. Now, those white Americans who feel any criticism of the country is unpatriotic have a poster child – a woman pretending to be black they can say proves blacks pretend to be victims for their own gain.
Gallup pollsters found in the last quarter of 2014 that 15 per cent of black Americans surveyed said the issue of race relations was among the most important problems facing the United States. That was up from 3 per cent at the start of 2014, a year that saw nationwide protests against the police killings of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Missouri. Among whites, the shift was slighter, from 1 per cent to 4 per cent citing race relations as an important problem. That nine-point gap between black and white perceptions was a distinct widening: Gallup reports it was no more than 4 points in any of the years between 2002 and 2007.
Surely, such stark contrasts in attitude grow out of a stark contrast in experience.
On Wednesday night, a young white man killed nine black worshippers in a South Carolina church. As photos circulated showing the suspect, Dylann Roof, wearing badges depicting the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and the now defunct, racist-led southern African nation of Rhodesia, black Americans were baffled and angered that some white Americans resisted calling the attack a hate crime or racist terrorism. The suspect was later reported to have confessed and told law enforcement officials he wanted to start a race war.
At the same time, black Americans this week are commemorating the 150th anniversary of freedom with marches and concerts, even as many of their fellow Americans who are white might be puzzled by the term "Juneteenth." June 19, slurred into the poetic Juneteenth, was the day in 1865 that Northern soldiers arrived in Galveston, TX, among the last secessionist states to rejoin the union, and issued word of the Emancipation Proclamation.
It is possible, even necessary, to imagine an America in which everyone celebrates the end of slavery as the beginning of opportunity for all. But that is not quite the America in which Ms. Dolezal lives.
At whose feet should we place the blame if a young white woman who grew up with four adopted black siblings and attended historically black Howard University concluded that caring about racial justice separated her from other whites? Whites have taken up, and even died for, the campaign to fulfill America's promise. When the NAACP was founded in 1908, initially to fight white-on-black violence that took the form of lynchings and race riots, its first members included prominent whites and blacks.
Ms. Dolezal's Today interview came just days before the 51st anniversary of the deaths at the hands of white racists of three young men who had travelled to the South to ensure black Americans could vote. James Chaney was black; Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were white. Ms. Dolezal has colleagues who have said her commitment to the cause of the three civil rights workers struck them as genuine. But activists are so frustrated that her name now is getting more attention than those of Mr. Brown and Mr. Garner that some refuse to discuss her.
In her book, Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today," Jacqueline Battalora explores an idea raised by Ms. Dolezal's public comments about her controversy – that race is a construct, not a fixed definition.
The rules were so fluid that a person considered black in one state of the antebellum union could cross a border into relative privilege based on a neighbouring state's different definitions. History has meant that today, one black family in which everyone is related by blood can range in tone of skin and curliness of hair from someone who looks very much like Ms. Dolezal to someone who looks like one of her adopted brothers. It is part of the U.S. race equation that a family of many hues equals black, never white.
Ms. Battalora, who is white and a professor of sociology and criminal justice at Chicago's Saint Xavier University, argues that what is often missing from conversations about race is that power was denied to some on the basis of that construct.
"People who are white, I believe, have a responsibility to see the truth of our history," Ms. Battalora said in a telephone interview. "It's worthwhile, especially if at the end of the day we can take a couple of steps in the right direction as to how we talk about these complicated issues." If race were personal, as Ms. Dolezal might have it, it would not be race as we know it. Whatever race may mean, racism is real enough to kill. And history is even less malleable.
Donna Bryson is a journalist, former foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, and author of It's a Black-White Thing, which examines the persistence of racism among young South Africans and the parallels to the U.S. experience.