Is race something that is subject to self-identification?

Rachel Dolezal is in the news a lot lately. For those of you who’ve missed this, Ms. Dolezal was the head of a Seattle NAACP chapter. She recently resigned after her parents provided pictures of her as a child where she is noticeably pale and has very fair hair. In short, she does not appear to be black (or African-American or any other term you want to use) at all and instead appears to be white (or Caucasian or any other terms you want to use). Her two white parents have said publicly that she is white.

When questioned about this, Ms. Dolezal has mostly been evasive about her ancestry but she has also uttered the sentence I quoted above.

Today, we count sex and gender among the things that a person can choose to self-identify; is race something that is also subject to self-identifying, as Ms. Dolezal appears to have done?

I’m going to say no, because the idea of “feeling” a certain race is nonsensical to me. I realize that there are people who feel the same way about gender, but there are chemical differences between the sexes. Go ahead and immerse yourself in another culture if it makes you happy, though.

I think that currently it’s not, but goddamn would it be an improvement if we can move in that direction. I’ve seen a lot of folk, black and white and other, immensely uncomfortable about what Rachel is doing. It makes me uncomfortable. But I keep thinking, if race becomes a more fluid identifier, how does that make anything worse?

I mean, I don’t want us to return to blackface, and I don’t want folks to be claiming to be black just in order to gain access to government contracts or anything. But if folks genuinely identify as a race other than that of their parents, and if we as a society go along with that, it’s gotta be a move in the right direction.

To paraphrase an old joke… “To you, you’re a black woman. To me, you’re a black woman. But to a black woman, are you a black woman?”

Sorry, but not enough choices.

There is a difference between someone like, say, Tiger Woods, Rachel D, and others. TW isn’t clearly one race, and he might self-identify as Asian whereas other people see him as black. He’s such a mix, but the largest mix is Asian, and maybe he grew up feeling more affiliated with that side of the family.

RD is somewhat of an interesting case in that she is clearly white, but she does have some hooks into the black community (black adoptive siblings, black adoptive children and a black x-husband). She’s not exactly Tiger Woods, but she’s not just some random white person, either.

And then you could have someone who is white, has been white all their lives, and then suddenly decides to self-identify as black without any “hook” into the black community.

I’m 100% sympathetic with TW, and he gets to choose whichever race he feels most part of, or none at all. I’m pretty much on board with RD being able to self-identify, with the caveat that she seems to have some “issues” that might maker her decision more like a mental health problem than with a real cultural affilliation.

As for the 3rd type mentioned above, no. You don’t get to suddenly switch your race like putting on a new outfit for the season. That’s a game, and not one worth playing.

Then there was the story of an Asian girl, adopted as an infant into a white, midwestern family, and who grew up with white friends, in white community. She self-identified as white, and you could hardly blame her. She had absolutely no connection to her birth country, and no reason to feel part of it other than the way she looked.

Like John said, it’s complicated.

Suppose it had been Jennifer Beals instead of Rachel Dolezal who had been involved in this situation in Spokane. Beals is generally considered white. But she is biracial; her mother is white and her father was black. So despite her appearance, I don’t think anyone would object very strongly if Beals had chosen to identify herself as black.

If race can’t be self-identified then who does get to identify it? Does it come up for a vote?

It kind of seems like it, but mostly among bi-racial people. I’m only going on my observations, but it seems that people with a white parent and a black parent identify as “black” because their skin is a darker shade than “white”, even though their heritage is 50/50. Case in point: President Obama is the “first black president” even though his mother is white and he grew up in her white family. He’s half white. Also an article in today’s Huff Post from a columnist who says “I Am Black. Rachel Dolezal Is Not.” Turns out the columnist’s biological father is white. To me it seems that black heritage trumps white heritage when the person has both.

That’s what happens in a country that adopted a policy like the one drop rule.

There are identities that are guarded by formal, codeified rules. Nationality would be one (you can’t just say you’re an American unless you have been granted citizenship). Certain religious affiliations are another. You can’t just wake up tomorrow and say you’re Jewish. You have to meet certain criteria.

Then there are identities that are guarded by informal rules. I’d say blackness is one of them. Sure, go ahead and identify yourself as black. But if you want people to treat that identity seriously, you’re going to have to explain yourself somehow. A white person adopted by a black family, raised and educated with black folk, and socially acccepted as black by black folk? Sure, a person like this will be allowed to call themselves “black”. But even then, only in a tongue-in-cheek way. A light-skinned person of recent African descent will be granted “blackness” too. But in this case, their ancestry gets them in the door. So, I disagree with this notion that anyone can identify as anything they want. I mean, they can, but that doesn’t mean others are obligated to accomodate them.

Far as I can tell, Rachel doesn’t have a lot of folk vouching for her blackness, though. She’s no longer married to her black husband and appears estranged from her biracial child. It appears that she’s estranged from her black adopted siblings. No throngs of black friends have rushed to her support. You don’t have to be black to be the president of an NAACP chapter or be an adjunct Africana professor (she has only taught two classes since 2011), so these things don’t really count as measures of blackness (IMHO).

Speaking of the NAACP, there’s always Benjamin Jealous, former president of the whole thing. He self-identifies as black, and I guess he grew up in a “black household”, but he looks white to a lot of people, and is actually much more white than black-- 80% of his ancestry is European, 20% African. As HL Gates put it in his show about tracing the roots of black Americans-- you’re the whitest black guy we’ve every analyzed! :slight_smile:

I keep thinking of the Steve Martin movie “The Jerk” as an extreme, but informative example. In the movie, Martin’s character, Navin Johnson, is as white-colored as people get, but is adopted as an infant, and raised by a rural sharecropping black family.

I’d think that Navin would have every right to identify as black, even if his actual skin color was considerably lighter than what would normally be considered as black. And, I suspect, for all intents and purposes other than visual, he’d effectively be black (bad jokes about no rhythm aside).

By the same logic, the President could choose to identify as white, although that’s not the choice he’s made.

Sure, Obama could choose a “white” identity. But I don’t think the majority of people would respect it. Do you?

I mean, can you name any person with a phenotype characteristic of African descent who self-identifies as white? Biracial, yes. But white? I’ve never met such a person in all of my life.

You get to define your own race.
You get to define what you think other people’s race is.
You don’t get to define what other people define as their race.

Nobody is obligated to accommodate anyone’s racial identity, are they?

I guess in official circles that can be different. I’ve had students fill out forms in-class that ask for their racial group (in the past–we don’t have these forms any more, thank god). One blue-eyed blond girl who’d just moved here from Hawaii checked her race as “Asian/Hawaiian/Pacific Islander,” misunderstanding the question. I double-checked school records and changed her form to match. There are doubtless other cases in which we more or less have to accept someone’s racial identity, though.

But I don’t think we’re talking about official contexts here. We’re talking about social contexts. And the big question I keep asking is, who benefits from excluding someone from the racial identity they sincerely adopt?

As an Asian, I could call myself white, but it just wouldn’t be true.

Those are two different questions. Obama looks pretty typical of African-Americans. He’s obviously mixed, but obviously a good chunk of that mix is African. In our culture, that means you’re black. But what of the guy who is 25% African, still looks a bit black, but identifies with the white side of his family? I’m sympathetic to that guy’s claim, no matter what he looks like.

Tiger Woods got a lot of heat when he didn’t immediately self-identify as black, but he gets much less than 50% of his genetic heritage from Africa-- maybe as little as 25%. What of his children? Are they black?

Race has always had made up rules. So lets just keeping making up more.

I can understand Ms Dolezal identifying *with *blacks and their culture; identifying herself *as *black just makes her a nut job or a liar or both.
No, in my opinion one cannot identify themselves as something they aren’t just because they really really like that culture. Why the need to anyway? Aside from benefits like affirmative action which Ms Dolezal did not receive, what’s the point?

My first though is, yes, if you are mixed. Like if one parent is Asian, and the other is black and a person identifies more with one than the other, then they could self identify as that race.

But I don’t think a white person who has more in common culturally with another race can just decide she/he is that race.