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The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal

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A

AuthenticM

Member
The full interview. It's quite long and I encourage you to read it. Here's a passage from the beginning:

racheldolezal-rajahbose-5.jpg


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.
Click to expand...

Needless to say, Oluo is not a fan of Rachel.

edit: changed the excerpts
 
J

JBourne

maybe tomorrow it rains
before I left Dolezal, I remembered that my editors had told me to make sure the photographer got a few pictures of us together. We were both sitting at the kitchen table, which provided an ideal photo opportunity.

The natural light from the sliding door by the kitchen was great for photography, but with our current seating arrangement, that light was falling on me and leaving her in the shadow. It is standard practice to have the interviewee sit in the best light, so I asked her to switch seats. The photographer thanked me for the suggestion, and I stood to allow Dolezal to take the chair I had been in.

Dolezal looked at me with a smirk and said accusingly: "Then you'll look darker and I'll look lighter, because the light's on me. I get it."

I realized that like all other black people who had challenged Dolezal, I had been written off as a bitter, petty black woman. She was concerned that the wrong lighting would make her look white.

She could not see that there was no amount of lighting that would make her look whiter than that interaction had. Perhaps that itself was the secret to the power of the Dolezal phenomenon—the overwhelming whiteness of it all.
Click to expand...

Damn, Oluo doesn't pull any punches.
 
T

The Kree

Banned
For everybody asking why she won't go away, why can't we just start ignoring her:

For a white woman who had grown up with only a few magazines of stylized images of blackness to imagine herself into a real-life black identity without any lived black experience, to turn herself into a black history professor without a history degree, to place herself at the forefront of local black society that she had adopted less than a decade earlier, all while seeming to claim to do it better and more authentically than any black person who would dare challenge her—well, it's the ultimate "you can be anything" success story of white America. Another branch of manifest destiny. No wonder America couldn't get enough of the Dolezal story.

Perhaps it really was that simple. I couldn't escape Rachel Dolezal because I can't escape white supremacy. And it is white supremacy that told an unhappy and outcast white woman that black identity was hers for the taking. It is white supremacy that told her that any black people who questioned her were obviously uneducated and unmotivated to rise to her level of wokeness. It is white supremacy that then elevated this display of privilege into the dominating conversation on black female identity in America. It is white supremacy that decided that it was worth a book deal, national news coverage, and yes—even this interview.

And with that, the anger that I had toward her began to melt away. Dolezal is simply a white woman who cannot help but center herself in all that she does—including her fight for racial justice. And if racial justice doesn't center her, she will redefine race itself in order to make that happen. It is a bit extreme, but it is in no way new for white people to take what they want from other cultures in the name of love and respect, while distorting or discarding the remainder of that culture for their comfort. What else is National Geographic but a long history of this practice. Maybe now that I've seen the unoriginality of it all, even with my sister's name that she has claimed as her own, she will haunt me no more and simply blend into the rest of white supremacy that I battle every day.​

That's why.
 
E

ezekial45

Banned
That's a fucking great title. I read this earlier, and it was a wonderful, and somewhat depressing to read. This is woman is so far gone, and it's sad that so many people enabled this behavior.

The ending of the article was especially poignant too.

I realized that like all other black people who had challenged Dolezal, I had been written off as a bitter, petty black woman. She was concerned that the wrong lighting would make her look white.

She could not see that there was no amount of lighting that would make her look whiter than that interaction had. Perhaps that itself was the secret to the power of the Dolezal phenomenon—the overwhelming whiteness of it all.
Click to expand...
 
E

EdibleKnife

Member
geomon said:
Hot damn man. How does this woman (Dolezal) have any audience left to sell to? Who is buying her shit?
Click to expand...

Bigots and ignorant bleeding hearts who think she's been treated "unfairly" or desperately want transracial to be a thing so they can destroy the validity of trans and black people.
 
H

hey_monkey

Banned
The Kree said:
For everybody asking why she won't go away, why can't we just start ignoring her:

For a white woman who had grown up with only a few magazines of stylized images of blackness to imagine herself into a real-life black identity without any lived black experience, to turn herself into a black history professor without a history degree, to place herself at the forefront of local black society that she had adopted less than a decade earlier, all while seeming to claim to do it better and more authentically than any black person who would dare challenge her—well, it's the ultimate "you can be anything" success story of white America. Another branch of manifest destiny. No wonder America couldn't get enough of the Dolezal story.

Perhaps it really was that simple. I couldn't escape Rachel Dolezal because I can't escape white supremacy. And it is white supremacy that told an unhappy and outcast white woman that black identity was hers for the taking. It is white supremacy that told her that any black people who questioned her were obviously uneducated and unmotivated to rise to her level of wokeness. It is white supremacy that then elevated this display of privilege into the dominating conversation on black female identity in America. It is white supremacy that decided that it was worth a book deal, national news coverage, and yes—even this interview.

And with that, the anger that I had toward her began to melt away. Dolezal is simply a white woman who cannot help but center herself in all that she does—including her fight for racial justice. And if racial justice doesn't center her, she will redefine race itself in order to make that happen. It is a bit extreme, but it is in no way new for white people to take what they want from other cultures in the name of love and respect, while distorting or discarding the remainder of that culture for their comfort. What else is National Geographic but a long history of this practice. Maybe now that I've seen the unoriginality of it all, even with my sister's name that she has claimed as her own, she will haunt me no more and simply blend into the rest of white supremacy that I battle every day.​

That's why.
Click to expand...

THIS is why I think this is such a great interview. I'm glad you pulled it out.
 
C

crowphoenix

Banned
The Kree said:
For everybody asking why she won't go away, why can't we just start ignoring her:

For a white woman who had grown up with only a few magazines of stylized images of blackness to imagine herself into a real-life black identity without any lived black experience, to turn herself into a black history professor without a history degree, to place herself at the forefront of local black society that she had adopted less than a decade earlier, all while seeming to claim to do it better and more authentically than any black person who would dare challenge her—well, it's the ultimate "you can be anything" success story of white America. Another branch of manifest destiny. No wonder America couldn't get enough of the Dolezal story.

Perhaps it really was that simple. I couldn't escape Rachel Dolezal because I can't escape white supremacy. And it is white supremacy that told an unhappy and outcast white woman that black identity was hers for the taking. It is white supremacy that told her that any black people who questioned her were obviously uneducated and unmotivated to rise to her level of wokeness. It is white supremacy that then elevated this display of privilege into the dominating conversation on black female identity in America. It is white supremacy that decided that it was worth a book deal, national news coverage, and yes—even this interview.

And with that, the anger that I had toward her began to melt away. Dolezal is simply a white woman who cannot help but center herself in all that she does—including her fight for racial justice. And if racial justice doesn't center her, she will redefine race itself in order to make that happen. It is a bit extreme, but it is in no way new for white people to take what they want from other cultures in the name of love and respect, while distorting or discarding the remainder of that culture for their comfort. What else is National Geographic but a long history of this practice. Maybe now that I've seen the unoriginality of it all, even with my sister's name that she has claimed as her own, she will haunt me no more and simply blend into the rest of white supremacy that I battle every day.​

That's why.
Click to expand...
That is burning truth.
 
B

bobbychalkers

Member
Before I left Dolezal, I remembered that my editors had told me to make sure the photographer got a few pictures of us together. We were both sitting at the kitchen table, which provided an ideal photo opportunity.

The natural light from the sliding door by the kitchen was great for photography, but with our current seating arrangement, that light was falling on me and leaving her in the shadow. It is standard practice to have the interviewee sit in the best light, so I asked her to switch seats. The photographer thanked me for the suggestion, and I stood to allow Dolezal to take the chair I had been in.

Dolezal looked at me with a smirk and said accusingly: "Then you'll look darker and I'll look lighter, because the light's on me. I get it."

I realized that like all other black people who had challenged Dolezal, I had been written off as a bitter, petty black woman. She was concerned that the wrong lighting would make her look white.

She could not see that there was no amount of lighting that would make her look whiter than that interaction had. Perhaps that itself was the secret to the power of the Dolezal phenomenon—the overwhelming whiteness of it all.
Click to expand...
ko_by_barlowsandist-d9opug3.png
.
 
J

Jakoo

Member
Alternative Title: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

Loved the frankness of the author here, although, I don't know if I completely 100% agree with her conclusion. While privilege is certainly involved, it feels it's a bit reductive to say that she's simply a product of white supremacy and leave it at that that. I think there is something deeper going on with Rachael Dolezal psychologically.

That being said though, I am sick of people (even myself) philosophizing about her. This lady needs to go away.
 
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