Flannery O’Connor has something to say. Upon hearing the recent news cycle regarding Spokane’s own Rachel Dolezal, the famous Roman Catholic writer has recently rolled over in her grave, extended a bony finger through the soil and marked the following excerpt in her short story, “Revelation,” from Everything that Rises Must Converge:
“Sometimes at night when she couldn’t go to sleep, Mrs. Turpin would occupy herself with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn’t have been herself. If Jesus had said to her before he made her, “There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a n*** or white trash,” what would she have said? “Please, Jesus, please,”she would have said, “Just let me wait until there’s another place available,” and he would have said, “No, you have to go right now,” and I have only those two places so make up your mind.” She would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, “All right, make me a n*** then-but that don’t mean a trashy one.” And he would have made her a near clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.”
The reader will notice in this text, of course, the parallels to Dolezal’s more contemporary trans-racial claims, which include “I am definitely not white…” and “I identify as black…” and “that’s the accurate answer from my truth.”
Now, to be clear, the former NAACP leader is not only an advocate for the lofty goals of the organization, she feels so strongly about the issues [Criminal Justice & Public Safety, Health & Healthcare, Education, Economic Sustainability, and Voting Rights & Political Representation] that the graduate of Howard University and the professor at Eastern Washington University rejects any biological affiliation with the Caucasian parents, from whom she happens to be estranged. (Hmmm. The plot thickens!) According to the Los Angeles Times, Dolezal’s passion for the black experience even obfuscates the legitimacy of her Montana birth certificate, and “certainly there were no medical witnesses to my birth.” And what does the black experience mean? To Dolezal it means that her sons, who are African-American, are her sons and that “wherever they go, we’re seen as a black family…” Fascinating, isn’t it?
Well, perhaps. But not necessarily for the reasons that have oft been cited by Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthree on the Nightly News. And Kareem Abdul Jabar’s support notwithstanding, Dolezal has lots more to explain if she’d like us to believe that her crayon color-choices as early as age 5 somehow trump the genetic code imprinted upon the now 37-year-old via Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal.
For instance — please explain, dear object of the latest media frenzy, why your psychological profile so resembles that of Mrs. Turpin.
“If it’s one thing I am,” Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, “It’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’ It could have been different!”
Yes, it could have. Contingency rules the day and most especially the night, when we can’t seem to shed the flesh to which we’ve been assigned. And this is the philosophical conundrum that Dolezal and many academic pontificators fail to acknowledge. There is, in this postmodern rush to transcendence, the inescapable creatureliness of the human condition. Moreover, as Emmanuel Levinas once eloquently argued, “I do not posit another existent in front of me. I posit alterity,” which is to say, that experience of otherness or of others to whom I appear to stand in relation. And let’s invite Simone de Beauvoir into the fray: “The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself.”
My problem? It has to do with the collapse of distance between Dolezal’s obtuse European ethnicity and her opaque empathy for the African-American journey. Statements like “I identify as black” may sound as if they’re giving deference to personal prerogative, but they cheapen the integrity with which individuals risk relationship, face the sins of their (white) ancestry and overcome estrangement. Condescending remarks like, “It’s more complicated than being true or false” don’t help either. The fact is — we see one another. We smell, hear, touch and sometimes taste one another. Dolezal, in her zeal, presumes both sides of an embodied dialogue that must take place in a corporeal cosmos. It cannot be done. Hovering over the peculiar ground we occupy, which includes our chromosomes as well as our family of origin, is not an option. The magicians of individual autonomy have not yet mastered the trick of absorbing the awkward encounter. I am not you. And you may not seize the subjective mechanisms of the mind by which I act upon the world. What we can do, by contrast, is throw a gesture or a word out there, and toward the void that must exist between us if we are to remain authentic individuals. Dolezal, although extremely articulate, turns that prophetic, and somewhat mystical, dialogue into a mundane diatribe. Is she doing this on purpose?
Without delving into her subconscious, it’s now clear that this prominent leader in the Spokane community is not on good terms with her parents, who live in Troy, Mont. Dolezal is confounded by why they would want to “whitewash” all that she’s accomplished. On the cusp of Father’s Day no less, she has let it be known that there’s a difference between being a father and being a dad. She’s reportedly told her adoptive brother, Ezra, not to “blow her cover.” And when the victim of a supposed hate crime was being interviewed by Shawn Vestal for the Spokesman Review, the paper ran a March 2nd photograph of Dolezal holding a .44 caliber revolver on her lap as she looked pensively to the margins. Was even this staged? According to Vestal, when photographer Colin Mulvany asked her to pose with a smaller weapon that happened to be on the coffee table, the activist suggested a “bigger one.”
Ah, I think Mrs. Turpin would be proud. “When I think who all I could have been besides myself… I just feel like shouting.”
Look out there, Rachel Dolezal. Be wary of doctor’s offices where the ugly girls and boys still read books entitled Human Development. One might be flying through the air at this very moment!
***
And finally, I want to emphasize the religious and spiritual implications of everything-trans. Are there any as Dolezal slips and slides through the interviews? I think, yes.
Yes — given the Galatians passage which reads, “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” — the emphasis of Christianity has been on culminating identity of being in Christ. In comparison, our deliberate willfulness to be this race or that race, this socio-economic status or that socio-economic status, this gender or that gender, seems socially picayune and existentially petty. The concern of Christ is not for us to “be seen” as one identity versus another identity. It is, of course, to become the most authentic forerunner of that Reign of God in which our relationships are healed: “Neither circumcision, nor uncircumcision count for anything, but a new creation.” Please note, however, that the healing of relationships (including those with parents) is not identical with the obliteration, or the reduction, of them to visible traits or trends or like-mindedness
Yes — given the way in which Martin Buber recounts the precarious beauty of the I — Thou relationship: “Even as a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a statue of lines–one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a multiplicity–so it is with the human being to whom I say You. I can abstract from him the color of his hair or the color of his speech or the color of his graciousness; I have to do this again and again; but immediately he is no longer You.”
Yes — even given what Thich Nhat Hanh says about Inter-being: “You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing…” And, therefore, the “I” is illusory, a useful fiction for a lifetime, but not one upon which individuals should double-down, asserting their rights to being this or that objective thing. For Buddha, in fact, the sooner these distinctions — read straight hair/permed hair — are jettisoned from one’s consciousness the better. It is the desire to be someone, anyone, whom we might categorize, which increases the desire in the world, which in turn, perpetuates more suffering. And in this sense, Rachel Dolezal might even better serve her community by being No-Self at all.
