← Back to Fading Out Black and White
When in June 2015 Rachel Dolezal, a perceived black woman, was outed as white by her white parents, I was shocked by the intensity of the public response. The rage, mockery, and rush to judgment by both blacks and whites were so intense. It reminded me of the discussions about black people and white people during the Black Power movement where there was a flip of the switch: white was good, black was bad. Now black was good, white was bad. Today, new kinds of messages are being included in the college class curriculum, ones that see race as constructed, created for the purpose of exploitation, rather than part of nature. Here was Dolezal treating race as a construction,
disregarding the white she was born into, and stepping where she would into black. Yet when she dared to test these boundaries, blacks and whites held up the barricade of the color line once again. I wondered what changes had been made in how people think of these binaries today. Had we really moved forward in blurring these boundaries? The force of the response made me think perhaps not
much.
To answer that question, I wanted to look at the changing cultural narratives around race. To get a cross-section of different kinds of representation, I chose the media and public response to Dolezal as well as to Barack Obama’s election; the sitcom Black-ish; the new product of racially ambiguous dolls. What do our reactions and changing representations of black and white say about
either our shifting perceptions or the firmness of racial categories? I also sought out the voices of a variety of people in my focus groups where I gathered black, white, and mixed-race people in New York City to answer the questions: When did you first become aware of race? What makes someone black? Can a white woman become a black one?
I am studying a paradigm I have been fed since birth for being raised in the state of California (home of the Black Panther party, The Third World Liberation Front, 5 but also the beating of Rodney King, the O. J. Simpson trial, and the Watts riots). And this state is part of a nation that was founded on race. I am trying to dismantle it for myself and separate the fabric of how it was built to better understand my country and my own identity. I am not speaking for anyone but myself or claiming to know the truth about these questions, but I am interested in how our cultural narratives are shifting over time, and I hope I can contribute to this vast conversation.