Rachael Dolezal, it turns out, has been passing herself off as black. It usually doesn't work this way. She's the 37 year old head of the NAACP chapter of Spokane, Washington. Evidently her very white parents went on TV and outed her as being of the Caucasian persuasion. She doesn't look the least bit African-American to my trained eye but, that's not all that unusual.
Back in the day I had a dear friend who found out in a very odd way that she was African-American. Sandy was- is- extremely beautiful. Dark-haired and lightly olive-skinned, every man at the private oilman's club in New Orleans we worked at crushed on her. When she entered the bar area, admiring eyes were drawn to her. Whispers followed her too. "She's a high yella, Ferrerman" Mr. Brooks would whisper to me as quietly as a loud man like him could whisper. It took me a bit but my young, Yankee self had a pretty good idea what he meant by that. Hearing a less discrete club member ponder aloud (after she departed) that there must have been "a nigger in the woodpile" confirmed that she was some degree of black. I really couldn't see it but, that seemed to be the consensus.
I crushed on her too. We became friends. She was quite seriously involved with a guy named Russell though, so friendship was what it would be, I recall feeling her out about her blackness. She had two extremely beautiful young daughters with her ex who was Italian, though he had a decidedly English surname. If she didn't care to discuss her heritage with me, I was fine with that. It wasn't important to me to push it though I was quite curious. When I left New Orleans, we stayed in contact via letters and phone calls. It was the 20th century.
A few years went by and she called me up- very excited- that she had discovered what she and others had always suspected. She was black. A sister in law had phoned a local news station for some reason and a reporter greeted her as "cousin" when he heard her husband's name. I'm going from memory here. The SIL was certainly shocked and awed at this sudden development but I don't think she was too caught off guard. The newsman filled in some details and she discussed it with her husband. A Pandora's Box of secrets began to come out. There was a whole other black side of Sandy's family in the area, one that knew of Sandy and her siblings but they did not know of them. Until then.
Sandy, the oldest, was ecstatic. The whispers and taunts she had grown up hearing were now accounted for as true. For her it was cathartic. Not for dad.
Her father angrily refused to acknowledge his past. He had passed for white his whole life, married a white woman, and raised a passel of white children. No one, least of all his first born, was going to tell him he was not white. Lot's of friction ensued. The story got to Oprah Winfrey's ears and she wanted to have the family on her show. I think most of the family was on board but dad wasn't, and without him, there was to be no show. It was an awesome story. He served on a warship in WWII as a white man. What other black man could say that in a time of a segregated military, and deep in the Jim Crow south? He broke the rules. He married a white woman decades before Loving v. Virginia said that was legal. That was 1967 if you're scoring at home. There was a clause in the Virginia law prior to that that allowed for a degree of Indian blood in whites when they realized that since begat-ting is as begat-ting does, many prominent Virginians has mingled with Indians in the past and, this would have to be accepted.
Don't get me to lying on the "one drop rule" the one/sixteenth rule that I believe they had in Louisiana back in the day, and how all this was determined before DNA simplified everything. It was a huge deal then. Not sure of the year but I recall a 60 Minutes segment years ago where a very whit looking woman was contesting the state of Louisiana's assertion that she was black, because of that rule. She looked like my grandmother.
In fact, Sandy's entire family looked like everyone I grew up with, including my siblings. I knew the story by the time I met and romanced Donna, one of her younger sisters a few years later. Donna had no children but I think all the other kids did by then and their family get togethers looked like any other family I knew. Sandy's beautiful daughters, like her, were olive-skinned like momma, thanks also to their bloodline via daddy. Sandy was darker than her sibs, I guess because she was first born? I'm no geneticist. That's all I can figure. The other kids took their new blackness in stride by then. The latter part of the 20th century helped that along. New Orleans is an enigma wrapped inside a riddle at times but, Louisiana itself can certainly be a hot mess of racial gumbo when you get out into the various parishes. I'm convinced that Bobby Jindal got elected governor because voters figured he was Cajun, a local boy. Bobby Jindeaux? But when I last visited, a young biracial Mariah Carey was topping the charts. It just wasn't that big of a deal for folks to enter into mixed marriages. Well, to knowingly do so. With the advent of DNA, a lot of people might be finding out what was in the woodpile of their own ancestry. Unless you're running for Grand Wizard of the Klan, who really cares anymore? . Now, as you well know, we have a biracial president. Not everyone is cool about that but more than enough people were for him to be elected. Twice.
So, back to Rachael Dolezal. She's not black. I bet DNA will bear that out and there are no family secrets. If she wants to believe she's black, that's her business. I don't think she's the right choice to lead the NAACP chapter and that is their business. I believe that will be taken care of soon. Her heart seems to be in the right place but her head is not. We don't have any control over how we got here. We only can hope to know where we are going, and to go there as ourselves...trying to do it together, if others will let us.
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