Charleston, Dolezal & the “Possessive Investment in Whiteness” by Cherise Smith

Adrian Piper, Everything (2003)Charleston, Dolezal & the “Possessive Investment in Whiteness”by Cherise Smith | @cherisesmith8 | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The tragic event at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal in Charleston, South Carolina has eclipsed the news surrounding Rachel Dolezal who, Americans learned a couple of weeks back, assumed a black identity. And, for good reason: that nine African Americans were killed by Dylann Roof, a young man with an allegiance to white supremacy, has startled the nation—there’s no sense to be made of the violence or of Roof’s catastrophic acting-out.  Still, I would venture that lessons from the Dolezal case can shed some light on the situation in Charleston.
You will recall: Dolezal, the former head of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP was called out by her parents, exposed for constructing a web of lies about who and what she is.  The media questioned: "Why would she or anyone pose as black when they are not?" "Is the outrage equal to the 'crime'?" Reactions were swift and ranged from "She can't be trusted" and "She is a storyteller" to "[Black women] need allies not replacements" and "This is what liberals have created."  
Such comments reveal little about Dolezal and much about their speakers and their regarding positions regarding ethno-racial politics. More appropriate questions might have been: Why do so many people care about how one woman, who runs a small organization in a small city, self identifies? And why has this captured the imagination and attention of the American public?
But, to my mind, the most important issue at stake was and continues to be: why are Dolezal's parents invested in exposing what they, and others, call her "lies"? The answer, to borrow from the title of George Lipsitz’s groundbreaking book, is their “possessive investment in whiteness.”
Passing Strange
By now, the larger American population has come to understand that passing is when a person temporarily or permanently identifies as or switches to a different ethno-racial category.  In the 19th and early 20th centuries, people chose to pass for advantage.  For example, light skinned African American people disappeared into the white world to seek economic and social mobility, and some Jewish individuals undertook a similar change when they changed their names, switched religious traditions, and other cultural attributes to become 'non-ethnic' white and flee anti-semitism. Classic fictional instances can be found in Frances Harper's Iola LeRoy or Shadows Uplifted (1892), Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), and Imitation of Life (1934 and 1959). Such identity performances underscore the importance of racial divisions and reinforce the power of the dominant group--whites.  
This type of passing is easy for Americans to understand because it falls in line with our by-your-boot-straps mentality.  Our belief in American meritocracy means that no matter how humble your beginnings [including your ethno-racial, religious or class backgrounds], you can overcome them with hard work and grit.  The idea that follows--more privilege is always better--means that everyone would be rich and white, if given the choice.
What is infinitely less easy for Americans to comprehend is passing in the opposite direction: when an individual takes on a less privileged and more markedly raced position. The assumption seems to be, why would anyone in her right mind choose to be black?  Of course, this is the position in which Rachel Dolezal finds herself.  
She's Not Alone
Over the last forty years, a fair amount of visual art has been created to explore this type of racial play.  In 1988, artist and philosopher Adrian Piper produced Cornered, one of the single-most heady artworks to take up the topic.  The focus of her installation is a video in which the artist confronts viewers about their assumptions about her racial identity.  She expects that viewers assume she is white, but she declares, "I am Black. Let's deal with that fact."  She proceeds to construct a philosophical decision-tree that undermines the assumption that everyone would be white if given the choice and suggests that a large percentage of Whites are not as "pure" as they think.  
About ten years earlier, Eleanor Antin took on the identity of a black woman ballerina called Eleanora Antinova.  During the three week long performance, Antin experienced as an undesirable "other" which, one could argue, allowed her to better understand herself as Jewish.  At the turn of this century, artist Nikki S. Lee crossed a host of ethno-racial and class boundaries when, in her Projects series (1998-2001), she assumed the role of (African American) hip hop denizen; (white) trailer inhabitant; and (Asian American) skateboard kid among others.  The breakneck pace with which she switched identities suggested that identity is as much about what one consumes as it is about what one looks like.  
At best, such racial performances, including Dolezal’s, flaunt racial divisions, allow individuals to exercise choice in matters of identity, undermine the casual and easy assumptions made about peoples' appearances, and interrogate white privilege.
Dolezal and the above artists encourage us to forget what we know about how we think black people are supposed to look and be like.  Black looks as different as there are numbers of black people.  You will find people who identify as black who look like Dolezal in her "before" picture when her parents say she was "White", just as you will find people who identify as black who look like her "after" pictures (with braids or curly hair).
Simply put, skin color, eye color, hair texture, lip dimensions, and nose presentation are not adequate predictors of how someone identifies herself. Conversely, an individual's physical signs can sometimes be a window onto how she is perceived by others. More often than not, these two identities--how one identifies herself and how one gets identified by others--do not align.  
Furthermore, it emphasizes how porous are the boundaries between races.
To be sure, Dolezal is not the first nor will she be the last person to change her racial self-designation. Before "anti-miscegenation" laws prohibited racial mixing were struck down, someone who wanted to marry an individual from a different race would merely change what they called themselves in order to skirt these discriminatory laws.  Similarly, parents of bi-racial children will sometimes change their racial self-identification as a means to lay claim to family and show solidarity with the experiences of their children and partners.
More common in our cultural moment are white mothers who want their children to identify as they do and to claim a mixed-race or bi-racial identity.  Their reasoning, they say, is that they want their own ethno-racial background to count and not just that of the darker parent.  More likely, they want their children to reap the privileges and advantages they have because of their own whiteness, and they want their children not to experience discrimination because of their non-white blood. It seems clear, parents seem to want their kids to identify as they do.
Is that why Dolezal's parents revealed what they might call their daughter's 'true' racial identity? Their answer to that question seems to be, we don't want to participate in or perpetuate Dolezal's lies.
By turning her back on the ethno-racial designation they gave her, Dolezal has turned her back on her parents.  That must have hurt. From that point of view, it makes sense that Dolezal's parents may, perhaps, feel disappointment with their daughter.  It may be a parental prerogative to correct one's child, even when she is an adult.  Given the calamitous episode in Charleston, we must see that there is more to it than that for Dolezal's parents—it is about protecting the boundaries of white identity.    
The outing of Dolezal by her parents is, in fact, about them and decidedly not about her.  They are, effectively, policing her identity as a way to protect their own.  Are they afraid that Dolezal's blackness will taint their whiteness?  Rather than hide behind a generic "white" identity, they pulled out their ethnic particularities: "we are Czech, Swedish, and German," they said.  The little bit of “Native American” was thrown in for good measure, amplifying their white bona fides.  In showing their white credentials, they broke down the monolith that is whiteness into its constitutive parts.  
This rare occurrence is a letting down of the wall of whiteness, showing momentarily that it is not seamless and all-powerful.  It was, however, re-erected quickly so as not to diminish its power.  In this context, Roof’s actions should be viewed as an irrational display of white power in face of its faltering borders.
With the increasingly visible instances of racial violence being perpetrated against black people, it is little wonder that the boundaries between the made-up categories that we call “race” are being policed so stringently. Performances such as Dolezal’s have the potential to undermine racial divisions and contribute to the end of the senseless discriminatory acts that follow.
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Cherise Smith is author of Enacting Others, a book that explores across-race performance.  She is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where she directs the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies.  She is a Public Voices Fellow.