By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — Rachel A. Dolezal, the now discredited president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), has a few problems. Her issues, however, are not greater than those shared by all of us who have jumped on the bandwagon of our own racial and social hypocrisies.
It is hard to disagree with her own decision to resign—she could no longer have effectively presided over the agency even as she had raised the prospects and profile of the chapter. She evidently misled people (and deceived herself) about her racial heredity. Lying has no color. But when it comes to color and status, all we do in this country is lie and mislead.
And we love to sensationalize things that skew matters of ethnicity, gender, or lineage—from our weird obsession with Caitlin Jenner to our ignorance about Elvis Presley’s deep debt to soul music.
Like a lot of white people, I strongly identify with the cultural narrative of African Americans. In spite of everything that this proud people have endured; in spite of the centuries of slavery, brutality, and betrayal; black folks as a group have simply never given up on themselves or this society.
This is true even as roughly 20% of black Americans have tried, over time and out of fear, to disguise or camouflage themselves as white—just to survive. Aside from Native Americans, whom the whites vaporized in perhaps the longest-running military genocide in human history, black people have suffered from the most aberrant and physically-shocking racial apartheid and barbarism in western annals.
And yet: minus African Americans, whose ancestors did not immigrate to America but were savagely trapped, hauled, and freighted across the oceans (close to half drowned en route) by slave traders, we’d be painfully diminished. Imagine this nation without all the sublime musicians, philosophers, poets, athletes, inventors, thespians, preachers, and teachers who rose from the bondage and have watered our culture with their tears and blood.
Black folks are America’s Hebrews just as Motown is America’s music. We as a nation have only been as good as our halting efforts to free African Americans from the history we imposed upon them and that they have transcended.
A dear friend of mine, Beverly Robertson, the recently-retired president of the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, once asked me: “Why don’t white people just get over it? We blacks forgive! We just want to laugh and live in peace. We enjoy life!”
It almost makes you want to change colors.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. You may comment to him at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com, or post your comment on this website provided that the rules below are observed.
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