‘I feel that I was born with the essential essence of who I am, whether it matches my anatomy and complexion or not. I've never questioned being a girl or woman, for example, but whiteness has always felt foreign to me, for as long as I can remember. I didn't choose to feel this way or be this way, I just am. What other choice is there than to be exactly who we are?’
Lately I have been thinking a lot about Rachel Dolezal. In 2015, this “black” woman was outed as white, and for a while her story fascinated and compelled us. DNA tests showed that what her parents claimed was true: she had no “mixed” heritage. She was white. She lost her job as an NAACP chapter president and became a kind of untouchable, offered work only in reality TV or porn.
Did she deserve this? Was I too hard on her, along with many others? What harm did she do? What was really wrong with her expressing who she felt herself to be? I mean, that’s what we are all meant to be doing these days, surely, now we are free of biology with its clunky old DNA and chromosomes. This is the new freedom. We give birth to our true selves, whoever our actual mothers were. We create the identity we choose, not the weirdo one we were “assigned at birth”. Isn’t that what Dolezal did? Why the uproar?
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