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Rachel Dolezal, Dylann Roof and the tragic history of white America’s love-hate relationship with “blackness”
SUNDAY, JUN 21, 2015 12:00 AM MPST


White America's pathological obsession with blackness -- in one case as farce and another as unbearable tragedy


http://www.salon.com/
ANDREW O'HEHIR 


There is a thread connecting the seemingly opposed stories of Rachel Dolezal and Dylann Storm Roof, I’m sorry to say: America’s unhealthy obsession with blackness. Dolezal loved black people so much that she reinvented herself over many years to become one of them, and Roof hated black people so much that he murdered nine of them in cold blood. It hardly needs saying that those things are not the same; when I say that I discern a relationship between them, or that they are manifestations of the same cultural obsession, I do not mean to suggest any moral equivalence.

If Dolezal’s conception of “transracial” identity strikes many people as an ahistorical delusion, most of us would happily embrace that delusion if it could undo the horrifying historical reality of Charleston. Roof’s story is a sickening and violent tragedy, with no evident catharsis or message of redemption; Dolezal’s is more like a farce, meant to demonstrate the absurdity of our species and its social conventions.

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According to her family’s highly convincing account, Dolezal was a blonde, blue-eyed girl who grew up in small-town Montana, one of the whitest areas of the country. Long after her fascination with African-American culture became a driving force in her life, she accused Howard University of discriminating against her because she was white. Dylann Roof, on the other hand, apparently lived in a tiny South Carolina town with a predominantly African-American population. According to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, many of his 88 Facebook friends were black. (His page has since been taken down.) One could extrapolate that Roof grew up in much closer contact with African-American culture than Dolezal did; if one of these two white people was positioned to claim “cultural blackness” or a “transracial” identity, it wasn’t her.

Does any of that make sense? No, not really – or only in America, the land of deliberately missing the point. We can’t look for logic or coherence in America’s racial history. We can perhaps say that the fear of becoming black and the longing to become black are powerful and sometimes overlapping forces in white American psychology, but that behind both of those emotions lies the view of blackness as something alien, seductive and dangerous to the established order. We can say that the most conspicuous and brutal racial violence (although not the most damaging forms of economic violence) has often been committed by poor whites who arguably could or should have made common cause with African-Americans on many issues. We can say that many of the white bohemians and intellectuals who have sought to identify with black culture, like the “White Negro” theorized by Norman Mailer in 1957 (in an essay that also introduced the word “hipster” into general usage), have operated from a romantic conception that didn’t have much to do with actual African-American people or their community.

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