Color, Character, and Rachel Dolezal: A Tale of Fluid Identities

Color, Character, and Rachel Dolezal: A Tale of Fluid Identities

by Jolivette Anderson-Douoning aka Jolivette ‘the poet warrior

June 12, 2015

I was taught in my early age that it was “okay to respect white people but never trust white people”. As I recall, there was always a sense of anxiety or urgency in my parents home, when White people were discussed. If a White person drove down Ledbetter Street while we were playing dodgeball or kickball, we would all stop, look, wait to see where they were going, and then continue with our gameplay. If they kept driving we knew they were lost.  If they slowed down to look at addresses, we knew they were looking for Mr. Raye who owned his own marine shop and fixed motors on fishing boats. He was pretty much the only person we knew in our neighborhood who interacted with white people at his home. Any other white person was deemed suspect and potentially dangerous. By the way, they did not have names. My grandmother referred to them in my presence by race and gender i.e. “the white lady”.

I provide this background of my upbringing in an all Black neighborhood in Shreveport so you will know that I -like millions of other Black people- have struggled to be the good and decent people our parents raised us to be, but the experiences I discuss above happened in the 1970s, before Reganomics gutted and destroyed Black neighborhoods. The services to parks, community centers, and after-school programs that provided the extra support needed to have healthier Black families and to maintain healthy Black communities were removed and replaced with ‘domestic weapons of mass destruction’ like guns and drugs. The neighborhood changed and it made our parents change so we had to change. We had to see the world very differently as individuals and as members of a racial group that was on a decline as it relates to values — to be clear, we knew right from wrong, but circumstance made many of us choose wrong. 

There have been a few white people who have challenged me to think beyond my parents fears of “respect don’t trust”. I remember most of their names: Tammy, Todd, Susie, Dale, Wendy, Carol, and Rachel. Tammy and Todd entered Hollywood Elementary School in my 2nd and 3rd grade classes. Tammy’s nose would bleed often and Todd ate boogers quite often. I thought they were weird by nature of what they did and because their skin was very pale. Susie, Dale and Wendy were from Linwood Jr. High. Susie totally embraced being Black, so much so that I got really tired of her hanging with all the Black girls, talking like us, acting like us, and trying to be us — and I told her just that. I was mean to her, she was mean to me, but no fist-a-cuffs ensued. Dale was my first ‘white boy crush’. Wendy was the girl who liked him and got in good with me because he thought I was cool but did not know I liked him… blah, blah, blah.

As an adult, Carol embraced me when I moved to Indiana and helped bring me back from a traumatic experience, and has recently found out that her great grandfather was a Black man, a photographer from the Harlem Renaissance. With the introduction of Google, I searched my name several years back. I found that a performance I had done in Jackson, Mississippi for Smith Robertson Museum was mentioned next to a piece of art titled Afrika. I knew immediately that it was Rachel, yes Sister Rachel Dolezal. 

The museum curator, Turry Flucker, invited me to meet Rachel to discuss the opening night of an exhibit showcasing her art. He had to prep me for this meeting, and he did. If he had not prepared me, it might have gotten awkward, even ugly. I might have gone back to the Susie incident in Jr. High School, and Turry would have lost points with me. He was Black, southern, and intuitive enough to know that my personal mission to “uplift Black people or die trying” did not include white people at that time or in that stage my “racial identity development.” I admit that Rachel confused the hell out of me. 

She was quiet, intense, respectful, and an extremely talented visual artist. She showed slides of her work and explained her method and approach to creating fine art. All of her subject matter was about Black people. Then something she said struck my heart so hard, so deep, I was challenged, if not forced, to open myself up to change. This young girl with blond hair and blue eyes said, “I remember being very young and saying [to an adult] they are so beautiful, Black people are so beautiful to me…”.  It was one of those spiritual moments of connection. She was honest about having white skin and loving Black people. You can see that love in her visual art just as people see it in my brutal honesty about race in my poetry, my arts activism, and my academic work. 

At a recent conference at Purdue, a professor used the phrase ‘blue-eyed soul’ that has been used to describe artists like Teena Marie and other whites who were genuine in their love and appreciation of Black culture to the point of making folks question their racial make-up. To sound Black, to look Black, to be Black are all infinitives, grammatically speaking, but the infinite must be viewed through a cultural lens when speaking of Black people and our specific history in America. I recall Minister Louis Farrakhan speaking of his relationship with the white Catholic minister, Rev. Flagle saying, “Color [of skin] would not matter if it had not been made an issue.” 

So, for all of my supposed militancy. For all of my friends and family who have no idea what I do as a Race Educator, and who think that I hate white people just for being white — her is my official ‘No, that is NOT who I am, that is NOT what I do.' My love and allegiance is forever and always with Black people, African people of the Diaspora, but I am not closed-minded enough, ignorant enough, or arrogant and egotistical enough to NOT build relationships with white people with a shared interests toward making a better world, when I have the access and the energy to do so. My Ancestors will not be pleased with me knowing I have been given these gifts of communication and made a choice to not use them to make a better way for Black folks -- just because I refuse to work with a person who has white skin.   

Rachel Dolezal has been one of my life teachers and an inspiration to me along the way. As she struggles with the fluidity of her identity that comes from real life experiences; 1) seeing the beauty of Black people from a very early age and seeing herself in her thoughts, dreams, and childhood drawings as a beautiful Black person, 2) discovering her talents and expressing that beauty and love through stunning fine art pieces, 3) being in a relationship with a Black man that produced a beautiful son, 4) legally raising her little brother who is now a young Black man, and 5) knowing up close and personal — by the access her white skin gives her — how brutal and vicious the systems of racial injustice are. The treatment of and the brutalities against Black bodies that are carried out institutionally are rooted in the social structures of white neighborhoods and networks. These are the rules, the social policies that turn into governmental policies, and they function the way they do because many white people do NOT want too many Black folks in “their space”. What is spoken around the dinner tables gets acted out in court rooms, schools, and  yes, swimming pools too. 

I am saddened Sister Rachel is going through this firestorm of media attention. It can’t be easy on her and her children. Just as her art work challenged me to see her and all white people differently, I do believe her social justice work in her local community, and how she chooses to identify herself based on what has happened in her life has the power to change us all. 

How we look at individuals and racial identity must be discussed with audiences of all backgrounds. Rachel’s choices have been put on a world stage. She will feel compassion from some and experience diatribes from others. She has to decide what really matters and continue to raise her children as a mother who is raising two Black young men, a mother who happens to have white skin.  Her color and her character are being questioned, and I see her current struggle as a challenge to me and folks in my circles to continue to define and redefine -- in academe and community activist ciphers-- what it means to be Black and what it means to be a human being.

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Jolivette Anderson-Douoning (Jolivette the poet warrior) is a PhD student in American Studies / Curriculum & Instruction at Purdue University. Her research work is titled The Antonio Zamora Years, The Creation of Black Cultural Centers as Safe Spaces to Teach, Learn and Talk Race: From Hidden Curriculum to Public Pedagogy when Culture Migrates from Black Communities to White Campuses.  She is creator of the D. Ciphers Migration Curriculum and a one-woman theatre piece titled Race Me, Face Me, Living in the Shadows of the Lynching Tree ~ A Poetry Reading, Performance, and Public Pedagogy~. She can be reached at DrJolly2015@gmail.com