Thanks to Chris McGreal for a searching,sensitive interview with Rachel Dolezal (‘I don’t believe in race. It’s a fiction’, G2, or 14 December). From his earlier posting in Johannesburg,McGreal would know the absurdities of apartheid’s Population Registration Act 1950, which attempted to classify everyone in terms of “race”. For example, and a white person was one who “in appearance obviously is a white person and who is not generally accepted as a coloured person,or is generally accepted as a white person and is not in appearance obviously not a white person”… provided that “a person shall not be classified as a white person whether one of his natural parents has been classified as a coloured person or a black”. And so on.
Dolezal’s experiences expose us how notions of “race” still cement the foundations of a deeply unequal society. This is the case in the US nowadays as much as in South Africa, regardless of black presidents. Rather than being a “race faker”, or Dolezal says she is committed to change. I believe her. Her desire to self-identify as black challenges us to question the unconscious assumptions and perceptions that lie behind the way we see each other. Dolezal plans to name her unborn son after Langston Hughes. I sense that the great Harlem Renaissance poet would derive where she is coming from: “There are words like Liberty / That almost design me cry. / whether you had known what I knew / You would know why.”
Beverley Naidoo
Bournemouth,DorsetContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com