Rachel Dolezal: Self-Anointed Sista or Self-Involved Spotlight Stealer?

The case of Rachel Dolezal, the head of the Spokane, Washington NAACP chapter who claimed to be black but is actually white, is bizarre to say the very least. It has created quite the interesting dialogue around the situation with many questions that are unanswered and some that perhaps may never get answered. Instead of the back-and-forth of whether or not it’s okay to claim you’re a different race, to take on another culture or to change your identity, let’s think about the motives for her carefully constructed persona.

This is purely conjecture but it seems as if there could be two main reasons for Dolezal to go to such lengths.

1. Maybe she just really, really wanted to be black.

We’ve heard the narrative about how she was raised in a multi-cultural home and had black, adopted siblings and was really interested in African and black cultures. Maybe she immersed herself so much that there was some kind of break between who she actually was and what she actually saw she was. In other words, maybe she got so much in tuned with her “black side” that she actually became black and the “white” her somehow disappeared and morphed into the new black identity. Maybe her soul always felt black and she just went with it.

2. Maybe she got attention and financial gain from her black role.

Let’s be real – a lot of people will go to very daring lengths for some attention and especially for some money. As the head of a local chapter of the NAACP, an adjunct professor of African-American Studies at Eastern Washington University, an exhibiting artist with works featured by the U.N., a trained diversity trainer and overall expert and advocate for the black community, she’s pretty profile. Thus, she’s in the spotlight quite a bit. She must also be pulling in a pretty penny for all of her work. Maybe she found herself an angle and it was a quick and easy way to build a life. Maybe she had white entitlement; maybe she felt she had the right to appropriate a struggle that wasn’t hers to bear simply because she could. Maybe she had a sense of white superiority where she felt she could help black people more than they could help themselves. Maybe she felt smarter and maybe she felt like some type of martyr.

Maybe, just maybe, this is just all too strange for us to wrap our heads around.