Langston Hughes looked kindly on racial “passing.” In his essay, Fooling Our White Folks, he describes it as a con at the expense of whites who deserve whatever they get: “Because our American whites are stupid in so many ways, racially speaking, I have great tolerance for persons of color who deliberately set out to fool our white folks.”
Our white folks are very easily fooled. Being so simple about race, why shouldn’t they be? . . . since they are prejudiced, there’s no harm in fooling the devil, is there? . . . Most colored folks think that as long as white folks remain foolish, prejudiced, and racially selfish, they deserve to be fooled. No better for them!
Like the blacks passing as whites defended by Hughes, Rachel Dolezal perpetrated her con largely at the expense of whites. She identified herself as African-American in applying to a police ombudsman position in Spokane, Washington and well-intentioned officials in the overwhelming white city (86.7 percent white with a black population of only 2 percent) were taken in. The same gullibility was in evidence at Eastern Washington University (only 3.2 percent black), where she was made a professor of Africana Studies. Like Hughes' heroes, Dolezal suckered gullible whites.
Of course, she also deceived blacks. There is something astonishingly cynical about using the bureaucratic apparatus of diversity to further one's career by pretending to be a member of minority that has endured centuries of injustice. Despite this fact, there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of her commitment to racial justice. Her advocacy as head of the Spokane NAACP appears to have been entirely in earnest. We may be surprised to encounter a figure like Dolezal, but Langston Hughes would not have been. In his short story “Who’s Passing for Who?” he describes a group of black artists who end up spending an evening with a couple with politics very much like hers:
One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help. Usually, to tell the truth, they have nothing to help with, except their company—which is often appallingly dull.
Dreary as the prospect of an evening with such people is—Hughes calls them “overearnest uplifters”—the visitors do offer to buy drinks and so the cash-strapped bohemians join them. After a cocktail or two, the white couple confesses that they are actually black and have been “passing” for fifteen years. All awkwardness disappears:
Then everybody laughed. And laughed! We almost had hysterics. All at once we dropped our professionally self-conscious “Negro” manners, became natural, ate fish, and talked and kidded freely like colored folks do when there are no white folks around.
But, then, at the story’s end, there is another turn. As the couple pulls away in the cab headed for the whiter, tonier precincts around Central Park, the woman leans out and yells. “Listen boys! I hate to confuse you again. But, to tell you the truth, my husband and I aren't colored at all. We're white. We just thought we'd kid you by passing for colored a little while—just as you said Negroes sometimes pass for white.”
“They had had too much fun at our expense—even if they did pay for the drinks,” the narrator concludes. I don’t know how much fun Rachel Dolezal has had in all this (more than anything, she seems sad) but she probably owes Spokane’s black community a round of drinks. As for the whites whose affirmative-action programs, diversity training sessions, hate crime inquiries, and deep personal cluelessness Dolezal so shamelessly exploited? They had it coming.
Matthew Schmitz is deputy editor of First Things.
