June 22, 2015--Black Like Me

In 1957, in The White Negro, Norman Mailer wrote about young white people who so liked jazz and were so turned off by what they saw as conformist white culture, that they adopted black culture as their own.

Four years later, in 1961, journalist John Howard Griffin, wrote Black Like Me. It is a non-fiction account of his six-week experience traveling in the racially-segregated South while passing as a Negro. Reversing the much more common reality of some light-skinned black people who, to avoid discrimination, passed for white.

In Griffin's case he arranged for his skin to be darkened through the administration of Oxsoralen, an anti-vertigo drug that also darkened skin, prescribed for him by a dermatologist. In addition, he spent 16-hour days for weeks under an ultraviolet lamp.

He met segregation, threats, and enough overt racism that within days he feared for his life and tried to blend into the background so as to avoid the dangers he sensed around him. He kept a journal of his travels and it formed the core of his book and then later a major motion picture starring James Whitmore.

Something analogous to this has been going on in the state of Washington where Rachel Dolezal recently resigned from her position as president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. Like Griffin she is white and was attempting to pass for black.

Aside from the fact that she has become an instant butt of jokes on late-night TV and comes from a crazy-mixed-up family (her parents were the ones ultimately to out her) her claim that she is black (which she still insists is true though acknowledging she does not have "one drop of black blood" in her genetic background) raises a whole set of complicated issues about race and identity and what it means to be black or white or Asian or Christian or Jewish or, for that matter, male or female.

In regard to the latter, Bruce Jenner recently revealed that he was undergoing treatment to become a biological woman because for his entire live he thought of himself more as a woman than a man.

Dolezal says a version of the same thing--growing up with four adopted black children as siblings she claims to have developed a deep commitment to black culture and the issues African Americans, because of their race, still face in America.

She said, and continues to affirm even after being forced to resign and dragged through the media gauntlet, that she "identifies as black"--

But it's a little more complex than me identifying as black, or answering the question of, 'Are you black or white?' . . . Well, I definitely am not white. Nothing about being white describes who I am.

She, though, is genetically white but thinks of herself as black. Jenner is genetically male but identifies as female. Situations of this kind are common enough and are now being more openly discussed.

Mainly, what constitutes gender (clearly more than genitals)? What defines race? Just how much African blood or DNA must one have to be considered black by others? And how much, if any, needs to be present for blacks or whites to deem themselves one or the other? Or determined by society and perhaps the courts if necessary? For example, in affirmative action cases?

Freud famously said, "Biology is destiny."

Perhaps not.

Indeed, many scholars claim that all forms of identity are socially constructed. If so--and I feel a strong case can be made that this is true--why is it all right for Bruce Jenner to think of himself as a woman but inappropriate for Rachel Dolezal to take on a black identity? If it is all right to assume one's own sense of gender, ethnicity, or belief system, why not blackness? Or whiteness? Is race still our hottest button?