AuthenticM
Member
The full interview. It's quite long and I encourage you to read it. Here's a passage from the beginning:
Needless to say, Oluo is not a fan of Rachel.
edit: changed the excerpts
I ask her specifically about the problematic sections of the book, explaining that her description of falling in love with blackness based on a National Geographic and a Sports Illustrated seems fetishizing to me.
"As a black person, as a kid," I say, "I remember National Geographic being something that was used to mock me regularly. A lot of the images of black people in National Geographic have been incredibly fetishizing over the years. Is there a reason why you chose the language that you chose? Because honestly, if anybody came up to me and said their first encounter with blackness was through National Geographic, and they loved it, I would end the conversation immediately."
Dolezal seems offended I would even ask that, reminding me that she was writing about her experience with blackness as a child. "Well, my older brother was fetishizing black women in National Geographic," she says, looking at me curiously as she folds clothes. "And I talk about that [in the book]. I felt like my gaze was more humanizing, and more of, again, black is beautiful, black is inspirational. I had a different gaze than he did.
"I understand National Geographic has been exploitative. I understand that. But as a 5- or 8-year-old child, looking at images of people, you're not looking with a doctoral degree of sociology and anthropology and parceling this stuff apart. You're just... you're looking at representations of the human experience."
I try to clarify that it is the fact that she thinks that her connection to blackness represented via National Geographic, no matter how inspirational, could be authentic is itself the problem: "But you are looking at representations crafted by white supremacy. I mean, it's not actually black people you are looking at."
"Just like when people are watching TV," Dolezal says in her defense. Then she seems to remember the interviews in which she had bragged that growing up without television saved her from viewing blackness through a white lens, and her tone changes and sounds almost bitter.
"In that sense, maybe I wasn't entirely sheltered from the whole propaganda," she sighs. "Or whatever."
There was a moment before meeting Dolezal and reading her book that I thought that she genuinely loves black people but took it a little too far. But now I can see this is not the case. This is not a love gone mad. Something else, something even sinister is at work in her relationship and understanding of blackness.
There is a chapter where she compares herself to black slaves. Dolezal describes selling crafts to buy new clothes, and she compares her quest to craft her way into new clothes with chattel slavery. When I ask what she has to say to people who might be offended by her comparing herself to slaves, Dolezal is indignant almost to exasperation.
Needless to say, Oluo is not a fan of Rachel.
edit: changed the excerpts