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?