This commentary is by Adrian Ivakhiv of Barre. He is a professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont. His ancestors were Ukrainian on both sides, and he has benefited from whiteness ever since his parents were welcomed into Canada as displaced post-war refugees. Since 2003 he has identified as a flatlander.
Homegoings’ two-part “eRACEing Race: A conversation with Rachel Dolezal” (2/15/24) beautifully models the kind of nuanced storytelling and open-minded/hearted analysis that today’s most challenging topics require.
The topic was race and identity, with a focus on “race shifter” Rachel Dolezal, who was born white but came to identify as Black, and who for years played a prominent role in social justice groups — until she was “outed” as white. By giving Dolezal as much time as it did, the program arguably leaned too heavily in the direction of privileging Dolezal’s own account of her story. At the same time, host Myra Flynn made clear she could not have made the program with any fairness to Dolezal without giving her that airtime. It was, it seems, the cost of taking on the topic.
If there was a center of gravity to the show’s argumentation, it was in the vacillation between (1) the idea that race is a social construct that, in the real world, has not yet been deconstructed, so its effects linger strongly and must be reckoned with, and (2) the wish to honor individuals’ identity choices. Framing this within broader debates over gender and transgenderism, as the show did, was helpful.
Yet that can also mislead insofar as it moves the discussion toward a topic (gender) that has become less politically charged these days, at least in some places. I want to suggest that another, equally charged topic — Indigeneity — could help us think it through more rigorously. (This was brought up toward the end of the on-air conversation, but was left undeveloped.)
The nuances provided by “eRACEing Race” are useful and important, but there is a fulcrum around which identity questions can be made more tangible. It’s this: identity is more of an individual option when it comes to things around which individuals are relatively equal in their capacity and impact. But on issues shaped by legacies of systemic injustice — especially those shaped by transgenerational trauma, such as Blackness and Indigeneity — identity becomes less an individual choice and more a matter of collective history and belonging. One’s own identity, in those cases, cannot be simply chosen. It must be shared, recognized, and to some extent collectively conferred. This is a point Indigenous scholar Kim TallBear makes clear in a piece called “Identity is a Poor Substitute for Relating.”
In other words, this is both about “what’s at stake?” and “for whom?” In the case of Blackness, Dolezal notes, correctly, that there are Black people in America and elsewhere “who are not descendants of chattel slavery.” An ancestry of enslavement remains definitive for understanding race in America, but it doesn’t exhaust it. As it becomes less definitive over time, barriers between Black and White might become less fraught.
But when Dolezal claims her “outing” placed her in a “no-win situation,” in which “White folks would see you as a traitor and a liar and never trust you again” and “Black folks might see you as an infiltrator and an imposter and never trust you again,” she needs to be reminded that these are in no way equal. To claim there is a community of “White folks” for whom she is a “traitor” is a fantasy. There are white nationalists, of course, but taking them as a baseline is wishful thinking. It’s Dolezal’s White privilege that allows her to make this comparison, to provide herself an “out” from honesty about who she is.
Dolezal was taken to be Black by people who weren’t aware that she was born white. She was not forthcoming about that fact. It’s possible to change one’s racial appearance (through tanning injections and hair styles, as Dolezal did) or gender identity (hormonal injections, reconstruction surgery, clothing, pronouns). But when one pretends to something one isn’t entitled to — because one’s history and ancestry have not conferred it upon them — people will naturally object when that’s revealed.
Being the descendant of continuous generations of African-Americans places one on a certain point on a spectrum. In one direction on that spectrum we find gender: everyone is a child of women (and men), so gender identity is not something whose legacy of oppression is inherited in the same way as Blackness.
Indigeneity lies at another end of the spectrum. That’s because being Indigenous is never just that; it’s more specific: one is Lakota, Anishinaabe, Mi’kmaq, Abenaki. Indigenous nations exist today because they have survived centuries of settler-colonial genocide. They have done this not as individuals (which would be impossible) but as intact communities, nations in fact, whose claims to land, history, and sovereignty have most often never been ceded. Those nations insist on collectively defining their own citizenship criteria.
Dolezal’s case leaves open the question of whether one can be a white-born, Black-identifying person. As Vermont Public’s three-part series “Recognized” (10/19/2023) showed, there are many white-born, Indigenous-identifying people in this state of Vermont (and elsewhere). Indigenous people whose ancestry has been thoroughly shaped by their Indigeneity — in Vermont’s case, this means the Abenakis of Odanak and Wôlinak first nations — have the right to call the latter into question, as they did at the University of Vermont in April 2022. That they were neither invited nor allowed to participate in the process determining who will be recognized as “Abenaki” by the State of Vermont bears a lesson we Vermonters have yet to learn.
I’m grateful to Homegoings for taking up these challenging issues, and for helping us to connect the dots. There’s more of that still to be done.
