How to resolve the issues about Rachel Dolezal
The pain evoked by the exposure that Ms. Dolezal was born of White and Black racism. Genetically there is no such thing as “black” any more than there is such a thing as tall or smart or Jewish. Being tall or smart does have a genetic component but, like skin color, these are complex traits determined by many genes. A person may look like she has African ancestors, but as Rachel proved appearances are not everything. There simply is NO “black” gene that makes person black or white. Being Jewish is another matter. Some of us are descended from the 3000 year old tribe but our “tribe” welcomes anyone who wants to become a Jew and recognizes their descendents (on mom’s side) as Jews.
So, here are some practical ways to move forward:
1. Everyone, especially AA, ought to be entitled to their genetic history. Currently it costs $100 to have this done but it ought to be part of your healthcare.
2. The term “people of color” ought to go away. All humans have color and when this term is used to include people of great privilege, e.g. Seattle’s Kshama Sawant a Brahmin from India, or President Cauce (UW) a daughter of the former minister of education from Cuba, the real bigotry faced by visibly black people is swept under the rug.
This is an intriguing issue. Attraction and lust being what they are, bloodlines are rapidly diluted by intermarriage and, um, interpersonal interaction. There are few, if any, “pure” persons of any race left. For example, what constitutes a Native American? American law leaves this to tribal governments to determine according to their own rules, and for some tribes, a person with as little as 1/16th Native American blood can be accepted as a tribal member. Africans have been on this continent for 400 years, and persons of mixed or mingled race abound in our population, so who is to say definitively whether someone is black or not? In an amusing incident, a white supremacist recently was informed on a national TV show that he is 15% black. The producers had looked into his genealogy. Race certainly is biological in some sense; but social identification and exposure to the cultural traits of a given race seem to matter more. This raises the question, if someone thinks they’re black and identifies with blacks and immerses herself in black culture and society, who is to say with any certitude that she is not black? The takeaway here is that human beings are tribalistic, and tribal identification is everything. This will be quickly seen at a football game if you wear a Packers jacket at a Seahawks home game — you’ll be lucky if someone doesn’t beat the crap out of you in the parking lot, and saying “hey, we’re all Americans here!” won’t get you anything. Yeah, we’re all members of one big tribe when faced with external threat, but the rest of the time, we’re a bunch of little tribes behaving not much differently from street gangs. After all, the Bloods and Crips are all Americans, they’re all blacks, they’re all Angelenos, but that doesn’t stop them from shooting, stabbing, and clubbing each other. Humans like to fight, period, and their tribalism lies at the heart of how human aggression is acted out in human society.