We watched
The Rachel Divide a few days ago, the new documentary about Rachel Dolezal that's on Netflix. She's a frustrating person to watch, because it seems clear to me that she really needs some therapy to address the root causes of her ethnic confusion. But she also seems to be the sort of person who really doesn't want to examine herself in any deep way. Therapy is often about confronting behaviors and beliefs about yourself that you're strongly attached to, no matter how damaging or untrue or wrong those beliefs may be. Rachel Dolezal doesn't want to confront herself.
If she had, this could have been sorted years ago. She grew up in a fucked-up conservative Christian household, one that held her in very low esteem. That fucked-up family decided to adopt black children (to "save them" from abortion) and she was given the task of reading up on "black culture," since the parents didn't seem to have any interest in these children beyond realizing their anti-abortion beliefs in a fucked-up kind of action.
Comparing the culture she was raised in versus the culture she was assigned to learn about, the former would certainly pale in comparison. I don't know what preachers or teachings her parents adhered to - the documentary is sadly lacking in that background material - but whatever they were, when set side-by-side with MLK and Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou and so on, it's easy to see why Dolezal would gravitate toward black culture and history rather than her own fucked-up heritage.
And she and her adoptive brothers and sister were abused by the parents and by her older (white, biological) brother. While she isn't always a reliable narrator, I have no problem believing the accusations of abuse, since abuse is part and parcel of the fucked-up conservative Christian culture her family was steeped in. So again, she would naturally be closer to, feel more connection with, her adoptive siblings.
White culture versus black culture, in her mind, becomes a struggle of evil versus good, and who wants to be evil? So she denies her own whiteness more and more, to the point that she ceases to self-identify as white, and only sees herself, only
wants to see herself, as black. And no one called her out on it (though the documentary does interview black women activists who had doubts about her backstory) until a local TV reporter did some basic background on her.
If she had done some thorough soul-searching at that time, and laid all this out for everyone to see, I think much of the ensuing controversy could have been mitigated. I'm not saying the black community wouldn't still have had good reason to be angry at her, but her adoption of a black persona would at least have made more sense. But she was stubborn and doubled down on her self-identity, and continues to do so. I think it's a stubbornness born of fear, fear of actually facing herself and admitting where her "black" identity comes from, and acknowledging her actual, white heritage, and owning that as an important, if extremely painful, truth about herself.
As the documentary shows at the end, she will do anything to avoid facing herself and her past and how it has shaped her personality and history and the decisions she's made. She will never truly be free until she does.
Also, an apology to the black community for her past statements and behavior would not be inappropriate, to say the least.
