Perhaps it comes from a position of white privilege. Perhaps it comes my interest in post structural thought, but I’m fascinated, even optimistic, and not offended by Rachel Dolezal saying that she considers herself black. I’ve been having lots of discussions about this topic, intermingled with discussions about police brutality, on Facebook, and I want to explore these a little more deeply here.

One friend wrote, “We must acknowledge the issues of taking on someone else's race is deeply offensive to some people, and those feelings are valid, especially with the social inequalities that still exist across ethnic and skin color lines.”

This was in a discussion about comparing Rachel Dolezal taking on blackness, with Bruce Jenner taking on femaleness. I acknowledge that some people can be deeply offended by others taking on their race, or gender, and that these feelings are valid. However, I don’t feel any sense of ownership of my race, gender, or culture. Again, this may come from my place of white privilege.

To me, the discussion about the nature of our racial constructs is important and an area where I am most optimistic. What is it that makes someone ‘black’? Is it how you consider yourself? Rachel says she considers herself black. Is it how others consider yourself? I don’t know the details, but it seems like many people considered her black, at least until her estranged parents spoke up. Does it have something to do with a legal definition of being black?

If we go back to famous law cases, we have Plessy v. Feguson which found that if you were one eighth black, you were still black. There were also the cases around the Naturalization Act of 1906 requiring people to be ‘white’ to be eligible for naturalization. This excluded people from Asia and India. Even Rachel’s critics note that she has “traces of Native American ancestry” and isn’t purely white.

My mind goes back to the ‘one-drop’ rule, the idea that having one drop of black blood in you, of having one ancestor from Africa makes you black. If you look at early human migrations, it seems like we all have ancestors from Africa.

Then, there is the famous scene from Show Boat. Steve swallows blood from his wife’s hand. His wife, a mulatto, has been passing as white. The sheriff is coming to arrest him for being a white man, married to a black woman. Yet now, he has more than a drop of black blood in him and dodges the charges.

Does Rachel have ‘black blood’? Perhaps from her ex-husband, who is African American, their son, or her adopted black brother. Is blackness based on experiences instead of ancestry? Like her experiences as a graduate student at Howard University or working for civil rights?

Is blackness something that can be adopted? Appropriated? Is appropriation good or bad?

This brings me to a second issue. We tend to look at things in a binary manner, black and white, as it were. Good or bad, male or female, straight or gay, black or white. Yet reality is much more nuanced. Myers Briggs tests don’t say that we are introverted or extroverted, they say how introverted and how extroverted we are. It is a continuum. Many suggest that the same applies to sexual orientation, and clearly when you consider people of mixed race, there is a continuum there, not to mention the continuum of how dark or light skinned you are.

Perhaps, by getting people to understand that race is a social construct based on many variables, including family history, skin color, shared experiences, we can change the construct, we can get more people to embrace their commonality with others with different skin colors. Perhaps we can bring equity to issues around health, around policing, and around so many other factors that confer privileges on people with lighter colored skin and present challenges to people with darker colored skin.