I had searched to find out what Ta-Nehisi Coates had to say about the controversy surrounding the white NAACP leader Rachel who had for years been passing as black. Coates is my favourite columnist at The Atlantic. I couldn't immediately find his post but what I found, excerpted below, briefly alluded to his earlier published works on the nature and structure of racial identity.
Consider these:
"In recent interviews with Dolezal, reporters have tried to trap her, asking “Are your parents white?”
This is the wrong question. We shouldn’t be asking if Dolezal’s parents are black, or if she looks black. The only question that matters is: Does she feel black?
We have accepted that Caitlyn Jenner, despite being born in a male body (named Chris) and having a Y chromosome and fathering six children, was actually a woman all along (OMG!) and simply forced into a male role by a sexist, patriarchal society held back by quaint notions such as “people with penises are men. . . etc”
America, their America!
I gave up writing an opinion on this matter when I read the above article. What more could I have added except the biblical aphorism credited to Christ namely that "those who are for us cannot be against us".
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