Earlier this year, the Spokane Police Department began investigating hate mail that Rachel Dolezal claimed she found in the P.O. Box for the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, where she’s president:
Dolezal said there were pictures of lynchings and references to local cases concerning race in the envelope.
During the course of the investigation, the Spokane Police Department noticed that there were important marks missing from the package.
Although delivered to a post office box, there was no date stamp or bar code on the envelope, according to a police report.
[...]
These letters are not the first time Dolezal has reported being a victim of a crime. She said she has been the victim of burglary, death threats and in two cases, nooses left on her property in Spokane and Idaho.
But the real story is that Dolezal has been pretending to be black this whole time:
Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal said Thursday that they want people to know the truth, including that their daughter Rachel Dolezal is Caucasian. The Dolezals said their daughter is specifically German and Czech.
How… did anyone fall for that? At best she looks Mediterranean, not black.
I can imagine the people around her living in this constant state of 1984ish, eye-twitching anxiety, similar to when Winston Smith’s friend comments on how wonderful it is that the chocolate ration’s been increased from 30 to 25 grams.
When asked if she was African-American, she was silent for 16 seconds, then said she “did not understand the question” and walked off the TV set.
Making a false police report is a crime. And using the mail [even placing in your mail box] is federal mail fraud, using the mail to commit a crime.
It has now come out that her adopted brother, Ezra Dolezal, who is black, states that she asked him three years ago not to “blow her cover” when she moved to Washington to start her life over. Her parents had adopted four black children, which may have affected her sense of what her parents wanted from children. Also, he says that she has essentially been living in “blackface”, and only adopts a black identity when it benefits her.
(More at Salon and elsewhere.)
It raises a lot of questions, particularly if you see her behavior as “trans-racial” in the same context as Bruce Jenner is “trans-gender”. Should a person be able to demand to be seen by society as whatever they sincerely wish or believe to be true?
“Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, said that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment, that sex change is “biologically impossible,” and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder.”
(Also, you can bypass the WSJ paywall by searching for “Transgender Surgery Isn’t the Solution” to read Dr. McHugh’s original article, which is excellent.)
By extension of this idea, Ms. Dolezal’s thinking is also disordered, demanding to be seen as black when she is not. Hopefully, I’m not pulling this sentence from Dr. McHugh’s article too far out of context — “They become persuaded that seeking a drastic physical change will banish their psycho-social problems.” And her behavior has gone way past some sort of harmless charade, by making false police reports, and by demanding attention publicly as an NAACP leader.
I have sympathy for both Jenner and Dolezal, but they both put themselves at the center of some serious national political issues. It is bad for individual psychological health, and our national political health, to state that individuals are whatever they claim to be (with any and all benefits and legal rights), even when it flies in the face of reality.