I'm Now Married to an African-American

Summertime in Georgia--even the mountainous northeast part of the state where we reside--is typically an exercise in ways to avoid or endure the humidity. Thus, with a six year-old, nine year-old, 11 year-old, and 13 year-old, we make as many trips as possible to the pool or lake. We usually also make one trip to Six Flags over Georgia and one trip to the Georgia coast.

In spite of what the title here implies, each of our four children--along with my wife and I--are as pale as paper plates. Thus, as we spend June, July, and part of August baking in the Georgia sun, a healthy layer of sunscreen is vital to our survival. Otherwise, we look like a six-pack of defectively striped peppermint candy-canes. Yet, in spite of our deep whiteness, my wife Michelle has decided to embrace her mother's birth heritage and now identify as an African-American.

My mother-in-law was born and raised in Nigeria, thus by any reasonable measure, my wife is half African-American. And of course, our children are one-quarter such. As would any reasonable parents who have embraced our type of thinking, we will allow our children to decide how to identify themselves.

Michelle (on the right) with her sister Suzanne.

Shamefully, it seems that the parents of Rachel Dolezal have not embraced such thinking. In case you missed it, Dolezal is the Nordic-Aryan, born in Montana, who for years now has identified as an African-American. Ms. Dolezal's African-American identity runs so deep that she has developed a stellar record as head of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP. She also teaches "Africana Studies" at Eastern Washington University.

(The photo on the left shows Ms. Dolezal as a girl. The photo on the right is a more recent picture of the 37 year-old.)

In spite of being born to parents about as white as Michelle and me, it seems that Dolezal has lived as an African-American for nearly a decade. According to the Daily Mail, "As time went on, their daughter began sounding African American on the phone and then she started to 'disguise herself' from around 2007, her parents said." Dolezal's father told the Washinton Post, "When Rachel applied to Howard University to study art with a portfolio of 'exclusively African American portraiture,' the university 'took her for a black woman' and gave her a full scholarship." Her identity change has been so convincing that CNN described her as "one of the most prominent faces in Spokane, Washington's black community."

Of course, in the world where the children in the womb aren't really human, where humans with a penis and the y-chromosome aren't really men, where marriage is not the union of one man and one woman, where student loans don't have to be repaid, and where blizzards are evidence for global warming, it seems that Rachel Dolezal would fit right in.

However, many on the left are not happy with her. Sean Davis of The Federalist asks, "If Rachel Dolezal Isn't Black, How Is Caitlyn Jenner A Woman?" When Davis got into a Twitter debate with the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart, Capehart condescendingly declared, "FTLOG ('For the love of God'), Caitlyn Jenner is not 'pretending' to be a woman. Move along..." Given who looks more the role of who they're "pretending" to be, I hope Mr. Capehart has no aspirations of becoming a TV or movie critic.

Capehart went so far as to call Dolezal "mentally disturbed." The headline at Salon read, "Stop making excuses for Rachel Dolezal: The Spokane NAACP official’s fraud is unforgivable." Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway said that those equating Jenner and Dolezal are not making "serious arguments." He adds, "[It's just] another attempt by social conservatives to demean transgender people, a phenomenon that has been quite prevalent on that side of the political spectrum over the past two weeks."

Expect such rhetoric to continue. However, also expect continued nonsense like ours and Ms. Dolezal's to reveal the lunacy of liberal thinking. As Winston Churchill put it, "The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may distort it; but there it is."

Copyright 2015, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com