#AskRachel

Every time I think about Rachel Dolezal, I just shake my head.  I’ve been processing this story since it broke, and it doesn’t make sense and it makes sense all at the same time—which is scary.  More than anything else, I, too, have questions.  Not really like the #AskRachel phenomenon that has overtaken Twitter (hilarious by the way), but legitimate—I truly want to understand—questions.  That’s the best I can come up with.  Rachel has me puzzled.  She may have pulled off the greatest act of minstrelsy of my lifetime.  Her charade is full of deception and delusion, and it begs that some psychologist or sociologist study her case and give us some type of scientific answers.  While we wait for that study, I have about 21 Questions for Rachel, but I’m only including 11 here:

  1. Rachel, why are you passing yourself off as black?
  2. What are the complexities of race that you claim most people don’t understand?
  3. What about your identity makes you black?
  4. If being black was a feeling, what does it feel like to you?
  5.   What did being white feel like to you?
  6.  How does one become black?
  7. Knowing that people of color argue for their own leadership and to represent their own voices, why did you feel that you could fulfill either of these roles?
  8. When you claimed to go natural (when black women stop perming our hair and allow our natural hair to grow) what did that mean for you?
  9. After the interviews, which will surely come, possibly the book or movie deal, how do you plan to repay the black community from whom who’ve stolen and/or borrowed so much?
  10. When people of color protest white America’s appropriation of our culture and accuse white America of turning our culture into costumes, what thoughts go through your head?
  11. Now that everything has come to light, how will you live your life moving forward—as a white or black woman?
By the way, I will surely be glad when Rachel no longer dominates social media.  Maybe then we can return to #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, #StopBlueonBlackCrime, etc, etc.

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