Summer has brought with it a perfect storm of controversies over “identity.” It began with Bruce Jenner, the iconic Olympian, really coming out as the transgendered and glammed-up Caitlyn on the cover of the July Issue of Vanity Fair. It will end with people still tweeting over Rachel Dolezal, the deposed NAACP chapter president in Spokane, Washington, who grew up a blond girl, attended and sued Howard University and maintains that she identifies as “black.”
At least Jenner’s television interview April 24 with Dianne Sawyers on ABC’s “20/20” prepared us for his big reveal a month later, but the race conundrum seems to have caught everybody by surprise. Naturally, some people in the news media and on social media have used the gender identity shift to explain away the racial switch. The argument goes something like, “If it’s OK for a man to change genders because he/she identifies as a woman, why can’t someone be ‘transracial’ if she/he identifies as black? Nevermind that many people aren’t comfortable with, accepting of or well-informed about the transgender scenario, but the race transfiguration raises all kinds of questions about color, class, privilege and the “one-drop” rule.
In the television interview, Jenner said, “For all intents and purposes, I’m a woman. People look at me differently. They see you as this macho male, but my heart and my soul and everything that I do in life — it is part of me. That female side is part of me. That’s who I am.”
Asked by Matt Lauer on the Today show, the day after she relinquished her position as NAACP local president, if she was an “an African-American woman,” Dolezal said: “I identify as black.”
Each of them is saying, in effect, “I am who I say I am.” To some extent that is true for all of us, and the fact that they “feel” one way or the other isn’t really arguable, observable or verifiable. As intelligent, educated people, we ought to at least to be knowledgeable about the forces at play in defining and assuming identities and be able to have serious conversations about them. Educators, particularly, can facilitate those conversations. This is, as they say, “a teachable moment.”
To foster that discussion, Diversebooks.net has a number of books for teaching, counseling and general reading on various topics related to identity.
Recasting Race, by Indra Angeli Dewan, $26.95, (List price: $29.95) Trentham Books (February 2008), ISBN: 9781858564050, pp. 164.
