- Anthony Quintano/NBC News
- Rachel Dolezal appeared on the Today show Tuesday.
Rachel Dolezal is the best op-ed topic to come along in a long time. She’s not just hot copy; she’s actually significant. She raises some really good questions. She’s one of those occasional subjects that remind the lowly pundit what fun it is to think for a living.
Yet where does that leave us with the former Bruce Jenner (whose situation has made Dolezal’s twice as interesting)? Can we say we are what we feel we are if we back it up with hormone treatments? Page quotes Meredith Talusan in the Guardian making what Page seems to think is an important distinction: Dolezal merely wants “to be perceived as black,” Talusan (a transgender Asian), writes; “trans people transition in order to be the gender we feel inside.” Talusan concludes with this: “I don’t need to pass as a woman the way Dolezal needs to pass as black, for the simple reason that I am a woman.”
I suspect many blacks who are appalled by Dolezal see themselves at the barricades. Having thoroughly lost the battle to keep various appurtenances of black culture from being coopted by white culture, they now face the possibility that pushy whites intend to confiscate the whole shebang. “We make better black people than you black people do,” they hear as Dolezal’s unspoken message, “and it’s high time we showed you how to do it.”
