The Outing of Rachel Dolezal and American Anxiety with Race by Lee D. Baker

The Outing of Rachel Dolezal and American Anxiety with Raceby Lee D. Baker | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Rachel Dolezal, former president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, resigned Monday amid allegations of lying about her race. The real news story was the social-media firestorm that surrounded her so-called lie that she was of African descent.
Genetically, anthropologically, and biologically, all Homo sapiens are from Africa. Nearly all anthropologists agree with the recent single-origin hypothesis that dates the dispersal of humans out of Africa a mere 60,000 years ago. For the vast majority of time that anatomically modern humans have lived, they lived in Africa.
In the course I teach at Duke University, called “The Anthropology of Race,” I tell my students that any American can check the box “African American,” and be on solid ethical and legal ground.
The “outing” of Rachel Dolezal exposed the collective anxiety Americans have about the racial politics of culture and the cultural politics of race. It was never about a technical discussion about the timing of the out of Africa hypothesis, it exposed the fact that one’s ethnic identity can change over time, that culture is learned (not inherited), and race is social and political, not biological.
In short, race is a social construct that can be produced, manipulated, and even fabricated. Human diversity cannot be sorted into neat racial boxes or discrete racial categories. Ironically, this collective anxiety about the plasticity of race, comes on the heels of the very public transformation of Bruce to Caitlyn Jenner amid unprecedented visibility, understanding, and legislative initiatives empowering transgendered people with more respect and rights.    
The tight alignment of race, ethnicity, and culture in the United States is the product of history and politics, preceding the Declaration of Independence, but codified and ratified in that document when Thomas Jefferson penned, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” With these words, Jefferson fashioned an explicatory cudgel that many individuals and groups used with mighty force to bludgeon and suppress people by systematically dehumanizing and infantilizing those for whom it was self-evident should have no rights.
Americans have a deep investment in keeping race real, and when there is evidence of the plasticity of race, the perpetrator of this hoodwink gets lambasted, ridiculed, and collectively shamed. Identity is a multifaceted modality that involves the people you love, the language you speak, how you pray, and how you fashion your clothes, hair, and family. If one’s identity is not aligned with one’s heritage, it can still be authentic.
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Lee D. Baker is Mrs. A. Hehmeyer Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Dean of Academic Affairs for Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University. He is author of Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (2010) and  From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (1998)