The transracial subject and the emotive regime: Rachel Dolezal, racial phronêsis, and inverted miscegenation

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes Rachel Dolezal’s autobiography In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World as a means to excavate the contours of an emergent Emotive race regime—a regime from which claimants to transracial identities base their sense of belonging. I argue that this Emotive regime repurposes Aristotelian ethos as a referent for racial identity, and I then show the entailments of this change in referent with respect to theories of racial reproduction. I conclude by cautioning that existing theories of racial constructivism may provide the theoretical backdrop to those who claim transracial identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethos
• race
• blackness
• authenticity
• rhetoric

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Jim Dalrymple II, “How ‘Black’ NAACP Leader Rachel Dolezal Was Outed as a White Woman,” Buzzfeed, June 13, 2015, https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimdalrympleii/heres-how-black-naacp-leader-rachel-dolezal-was-outted-as-a.

2 Meghan Keneally, “Rachel Dolezal: A Timeline of the Ex-NAACP Leader’s Transition from White to ‘Black’,” ABC News, June 16, 2015, https://abcnews.go.com/US/rachel-dolezal-timeline-naacp-leaders-transition-white-black/story?id=31801772.

3 Ijeoma Oluo, “The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black,” The Stranger, April 19, 2017, https://www.thestranger.com/features/2017/04/19/25082450/the-heart-of-whiteness-ijeoma-oluo-interviews-rachel-dolezal-the-white-woman-who-identifies-as-black.

4 Naomi Nishi, Cheryl Matias, and Roberto Montoya, “Exposing the White Avatar: Projections, Justifications, and the Ever-Evolving American Racism,” Social Identities 21, no. 5 (2015): 459–473.

5 Sophia Seawell, “Feeling Black, Reproducing Whiteness: A Sensory Analysis of Rachel Dolezal’s Identity Claim,” Junctions: Graduate Journal of the Humanities 3, no. 1 (2018): 45–58.

6 Mitchell Sunderland, “In Rachel Dolezal’s Skin,” Vice, December 7, 2015, https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/gvz79j/rachel-dolezal-profile-interview.

7 Colleen Flaherty, “White Lies,” Insider Higher Ed, September 3, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/04/prominent-scholar-outs-herself-white-just-she-faced-exposure-claiming-be-black.

8 Colleen Flaherty, “More White Lies,” Insider Higher Ed, September 10, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/10/more-allegations-racial-fraud-academe.

9 See Kathryn Knight, “‘THEY LOVE ME’ Tanning addict Martina Big says she is moving to Africa to ‘be with her people’ as she shares pics from her Kenyan house-hunting trip,” The Sun, February 3, 2019, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8312350/martina-big-tanning-addict-moving-africa/. See also Ryan Smith, “‘Transracial’ Influencer Oli London Says Trolls Turned Him into a Recluse,” Newsweek, January 29, 2022, https://www.newsweek.com/transracial-influencer-oli-london-says-trolls-turned-him-recluse-1673969.

10 Megan Elizabeth Morrissey, “Under (Y)our Skin: Rachel Dolezal and the Elasticity of Whiteness,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18 (2021), 242.

11 Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995), 300.

12 Myra Washington, “Woke Skin, White Masks: Race and Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020), 261.

13 Ann Morning, “Kaleidoscope: Contested Identities and New Forms of Race Membership,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 6 (2018): 1055–1073.

14 Esther Wang, “All the Rachel Dolezals,” Jezebel, September 4, 2020, https://jezebel.com/all-the-rachel-dolezals-1844953702.

15 Molly Littlewood McKibbin, Rethinking Rachel Doležal and Transracial Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 98.

16 Lisa Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016), 6.

17 Eric King Watts, “The Problem of Race in Public Address Research: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Conflicted Aesthetics of Race,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, ed. Shawn Parry-Giles and Michael Hogan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 375.

18 Rachel Dolezal and Storms Reback, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2017).

19 Lois Self, “Rhetoric and Phronesis: The Aristotelian Ideal,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 12, no. 2 (1979), 139–140.

20 Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 7–8.

21 Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism,” Boundary 2 12, no. 3 (1984), 41–43.

22 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003), 308.

23 Ibid, 263.

24 David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Knowledge,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, ed. Les Back and John Solomos (London: Routledge, 2000), 158.

25 C.L.R. James, “Interviews: C. L. R. James,” The Black Scholar 42, no. 2 (2012), 28.

26 Goldberg, “Racial Knowledge,” 155.

27 Eric King Watts, “Postracial Fantasies, Blackness, and Zombies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 4 (2017), 322.

28 Howard Winant, “The Theoretical Status of the Concept of Race,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, ed. Les Back and John Solomos (London: Routledge, 2000), 187.

29 Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black’,” in National Identities and Socio-Political Changes in Latin America, ed. Mercedes Duran-Cogan and Antonio Gomez-Moriana (London: Routledge, 2001), 30–66.

30 K. Anthony Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” in Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 54.

31 Charles W. Mills, “‘But What Are You Really?’ The Metaphysics of Race,” in Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 46–50.

32 See Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 11.

33 Paul R. Spickard, “The Illogic of American Racial Categories,” in Racially Mixed People in America, ed. Maria P. P. Root (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992), 16.

34 Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” 49.

35 Mills, “But What Are You Really?” 51–52.

36 Rogers Brubaker, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 8.

37 Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012), 55.

38 Nadia Abu El-Haj, “The Genetic Reinscription of Race,” Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007), 284.

39 Kimberly TallBear, “DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe,” Wicazo Sa Review 18, no. 1 (2003): 81–107.

40 Maximillian C. Forte, “Introduction: ‘Who Is an Indian?’,” The Cultural Politics of a Bad Question,” in Who Is an Indian? Race, Place, and the Politics of Indigeneity in the Americas, ed. Maximillian C. Forte (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 14.

41 Celeste M. Condit et al., “The Role of ‘Genetics’ in Popular Understandings of Race in the United States,” Public Understanding of Science 13 (2004): 249–272.

42 Alondra Nelson, “Bio Science: Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry,” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 5 (2008): 759–783.

43 Eva Marie Garroutte and C. Matthew Snipp, “The Canary in the Coal Mine: What Sociology Can Learn from Ethnic Identity Debates among American Indians,” in Who Is an Indian?, 114.

44 Morning, “Kaleidoscope,” 1063

45 McKibbin, Rethinking Rachel Doležal and Transracial Theory, 83.

46 Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 165.

47 Kent A. Ono, “A Letter/Essay I’ve Been Longing to Write in My Personal/Academic Voice,” Western Journal of Communication 61, no. 1 (1997), 120.

48 David R. Harris and Jeremiah Joseph Sim, “Who Is Multiracial? Assessing the Complexity of Lived Race,” American Sociological Review 67, no. 4 (2002), 624–625.

49 Rona Tamiko Halualani et al., “Between the Structural and the Personal: Situated Sense-Makings of ‘Race’,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2006), 89.

50 Dolezal and Reback, In Full Color, 85.

51 One includes the extent to which prominent critiques of MRS apply to the Emotive regime. Many scholars have drawn attention to the tendency of some MRS to imagine that the “race problem” will be resolved with the disappearance of Black people, as well as the problematic representations of mixed-race individuals in media. For the former, see Lewis R. Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 63; and Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz, 170–172. Whatever critiques one might raise of Dolezal, her refusal to (re)claim her white identity reflects something other than this anathema. This, in part, shows how critiques of MRS may not directly apply to the Emotive regime. See Marquis Bey, “Incorporeal Blackness: A Theorization in Two Parts—Rachel Dolezal and Your Face in Mine,” CR: The New Centennial Review 20, no. 2 (2020), 216. For examples of the fetishization of hybridity in media, see Habiba Ibrahim, “Toward Black and Multiracial ‘Kinship’ after 1997, or How a Race Man Became ‘Cablinasian’,” The Black Scholar 39, no. 3–4 (2009): 23–31; and Helene A. Shugart, “Crossing Over: Hybridity and Hegemony in the Popular Media,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (2007): 115–141.

52 The critical turn in MRS is influenced by a “critical” turn in scholarship more broadly (e.g. “critical” race, “critical” legal, etc.). See G. Reginald Daniel et al., “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies,” Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies 1, no. 1 (2014), 7–9.

53 Catherine Rottenberg, “Passing: Race, Identification, and Desire,” Criticism 45, no. 4 (2003), 441.

54 Paul Spickard, “Shape Shifting: Reflections on Racial Plasticity,” in Shape Shifters: Journeys across Terrains of Race and Identity, ed. Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, and Paul Spickard (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 11.

55 Paul Spickard, “Mudrooroo: Aboriginal No More?” in Shape Shifters, 387.

56 Many scholars note that imposed monoracialism on mixed-race people has affected their own expressions/conceptions of their racial identity. See Karis Campion, “‘You Think You’re Black?’ Exploring Black Mixed-Race Experiences of Black Rejection,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42, no. 16 (2019): 196–213; Marisa Franco and Stephen Franco, “Impact of Identity Invalidation for Black Multiracial People: The Importance of Race of Perpetrator,” Journal of Black Psychology 42, no. 6 (2016): 530–548; and Marisa Franco, Rahel Katz, and Karen O’Brien, “Forbidden Identities: A Qualitative Examination of Racial Identity Invalidation for Black/White Biracial individuals,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 50 (2016): 96–109.

57 Circe Sturm, Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-First Century (Santa Fe, CA: School for Advanced Research Press, 2011), 5.

58 Darryl Leroux, Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2019), 28.

59 Sturm, Becoming Indian, 172.

60 Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 41.

61 Sturm, Becoming Indian, 141.

62 Ibid, 142.

63 See Sturm, Becoming Indian, 178. For a list of self-identified Cherokee organizations, see 193–200.

64 Dolezal and Reback, In Full Color, 4.

65 Wendy Roth, “Unsettled Identities amid Settled Classifications? Toward a Sociology of Racial Appraisals,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 6 (2018), 1107.

66 A. Cheree Carlson, “‘You Know It When You See It’: The Rhetorical Hierarchy of Race and Gender in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85, no. 2 (1999), 126.

67 Lisa A. Flores, Dreama G. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama, “Dynamic Rhetorics of Race: California’s Racial Privacy Initiative and the Shifting Grounds of Racial Politics,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 3 (2006), 193.

68 Nancy S. Struever, “Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir,” in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2004), 430. See also Katherine Mack and Jonathon Alexander, “The Ethics of Memoir: Ethos in Uptake,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2019), 50.

69 Aristotle suggested that ethos primarily acts as a sort of argument amplifier that allows the speaker to take greater argumentative leaps. See Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George Alexander Kennedy, 2nd ed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1.2.4.

70 William Rodney Herring, “The Rhetoric of Credit, the Rhetoric of Debt: Economic Arguments in Early America and Beyond,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 19, no. 1 (2016), 67.

71 See Celeste M. Condit, “Public Health Experts, Expertise, and Ebola: A Relational Theory of Ethos,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 22, no. 2 (2019): 177–215.

72 Coretta Pittman, “Black Women Writers and the Trouble with Ethos: Harriet Jacobs, Billie Holiday, and Sister Souljah,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2007), 44–45.

73 See Johanna Schmertz, “Constructing Essences: Ethos and the Postmodern Subject of Feminism,” Rhetoric Review 18, no. 1 (1999): 82–91. See also Maegan Parker Brooks, “Oppositional Ethos: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Vernacular Persona,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (2011): 511–548.

74 Carolyn Miller, “The Presumptions of Expertise: The Role of Ethos in Risk,” Configurations 11, no. 2 (2003), 167.

75 Craig Smith, “Ethos Dwells Pervasively: A Hermeneutic Reading of Aristotle on Credibility,” in The Ethos of Rhetoric, ed. Michael J. Hyde (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 11.

76 See Kirt Wilson, “The Contested Space of Prudence in the 1874–1875 Civil Rights Debate,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84, no. 2 (1998), 133. Wilson refers to “prudence” in his essay. But, as Chris Brown notes, our modern understanding of prudence is a Latin off-shoot of Aristotle’s concept of phronêsis. See also Chris Brown, “The ‘Practice Turn’, Phronesis and Classical Realism: Towards a Phronetic International Political Theory?” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40, no. 3 (2012), 444–445.

77 Dolezal and Reback, In Full Color, 97

78 Ibid, 149.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

81 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Questions of Multi-Culturalism,” interview by Sneja Gunew in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 62.

82 Dolezal and Reback, In Full Color, 94–5.

83 Ibid, 96.

84 Ibid, 93.

85 Leanne Dawson, “Passing and Policing: Controlling Compassion, Bodies and Boundaries in Boys Don’t Cry and Unveiled/Fremde Haut,” Studies in European Cinema 12, no. 3 (2015), 210.

86 Elizabeth Watt and Emma Kowal, “To Be or not to Be Indigenous? Understanding the Rise of Australia’s Indigenous Population since 1971,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42, no. 16 (2019), 68.

87 Dolezal and Reback, In Full Color, 87.

88 Ibid, 88.

89 Ibid, 109.

90 Sturm, Becoming Indian, 41.

91 Dolezal and Reback, In Full Color, 60.

92 See Tracy R. Whitaker and Cudore L. Snell, “Parenting While Powerless: Consequences of ‘the Talk’,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 26, no. 3–4 (2016): 303–309; and Leslie A. Anderson, Margaret O’Brien Caughy, and Margaret T. Owen, “‘The Talk’ and Parenting While Black in America: Centering Race, Resistance, and Refuge,” Journal of Black Psychology 48, no. 3–4 (2022): 475–506.

93 Dolezal and Reback, In Full Color, 60.

94 Ibid, 100.

95 Ibid.

96 Vincent John Cheng, Inauthentic: The Anxiety Over Culture and Identity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 172.

97 John L. Jackson, Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 213–214.

98 Eric King Watts and Mark Orbe, “The Spectacular Consumption of ‘True’ African American Culture: ‘Whassup’ with the Budweiser Guys?” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 1 (2002): 1–20.

99 Leslie Stevens and Nicole Maurantonio, “Black Twitter Asks Rachel: Racial Identity Theft in ‘Post-Racial’ America,” Howard Journal of Communications, August 18, 2017, 1–17.

100 Ibid, 8–9.

101 Ibid, 9.

102 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Strategy, Identity, Writing,” interview by John Hutnyk, Scott McQuire, and Nikos Papastergiadis in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 38.

103 Morning, “Kaleidoscope,” 1058.

104 Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, 218.

105 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” 314–315.

106 Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, 219.

107 Dolezal and Reback, In Full Color, 59.

108 Ibid, 65–6.

109 Ibid, 66.

110 Ibid, 68.

111 Ibid, 60.

112 Ibid, 68.

113 Ibid, 97.

114 Ibid, 141.

115 Ibid, 172–173.

116 Morrissey, “Under (Y)our skin,” 240.

117 Cheng, Inauthentic, 74.

118 J. Angelo Corlett, “Latino Identity and Affirmative Action,” in Hispanics/Latinos in the United States: Ethnicity, Race, and Rights, ed. Jorge J.E. Gracia and Pablo De Greiff (New York: Routledge, 2000), 226.

119 Sandra Patton, Birth Marks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 16.

120 Sally Haslanger, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford University Press, 2012), 292.

121 Linda J. Seligmann, Broken Links, Enduring Ties: American Adoption Across Race, Class, and Nation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 156–157.

122 Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 65.

123 Morrissey, “Under (Y)our skin,” 235.

124 Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” 38.

125 For a primer on racial constructivism, see Mills, “But What Are You Really?” 41–66.

126 McKibbin, Rethinking Rachel Doležal and Transracial Theory, 89.

127 Adam Ellwanger, Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), 2.

128 Hall, The Fateful Triangle, 78.