On #RachelDolezal and the Incomparability of Race and Gender

after reading Adolph Reed Jr.'s eloquently-written recent piece on #RachelDolezal and continuing to see people (including Reed) trip themselves all up in making (in)comparisons between transgender and transrace people, i felt the need to rehash -- in a more cohesive manner -- some comments i recently made to my inner circle on the identity politics of #RachelDolezal.

the ascriptive/achieved dichotomization, and the fluidity between the two, is too simplistic to make to gain clarity on the complex problematics of #RachelDolezal's identity politics. race and gender are both sociopolitical constructs. but, unlike gender’s corollary to sex, there is no precise biological language for talking about race. and that is the conceptual incongruence with comparing transgender with transrace identities. the race concept encompasses both biological and sociopolitical meanings in everyday society, whereas the women’s movement has been (mostly) successful at divorcing gender from sex. the implications for this inefficiency glares its ugly head in moments like this, when there is a desperate need to distinguish biological race (meanings) from sociopolitical race realities. 

sociopolitically, Dolezal has a long history of utilizing black identities as forms of capital to be wielded (or villainized) so as to manipulate the color line, her color privilege, and colorism in the pursuit of power and prestige. a transgender person does not need to lie about the sex of their parents or their progeny. but Dolezal did, repeatedly, because her understanding of race is narrow; it is essentialist; it is biological. and, the need to lie about the race of one’s transrace parents/children juxtaposed against the non-necessity to lie about the sex of one’s transgender parents/children belies the incomparability of race and gender as social constructs. 

yes, Dolezal is well-versed in the rules of the color lines. by playing those rules to her fancy, she can take on the disadvantages of blackness and, simultaneously, the advantages of light-skin and “good” hair. but that does not make her claims of blackness authentic or celebratory. instead, it reduces blackness down to a performance. and blackness is not that. it is a structural condition of marginalization by the socially-constructed stigma of ascriptive phenotype. it is a sociopolitical reality marking the dehumanization of an entire group of people by birth. on these accounts of blackness, #RachelDolezal does not fit the bill. and, by these accounts, the duality of biological/sociopolitical race is revealed: not one or the other (as with gender, one might argue), but rather one (biological) in service of the other (sociopolitical).