Rachel Dolezal: Columbusing Blackness

For a few weeks now, I’ve been trying to write something about the colonizer mentality (aka ytppul ytppuling) but the words have been slow to come. The idea remained unclear until Rachel Dolezal’s latest interview with Ijeoma Oluo appeared in The Stranger. (here) Suddenly, it all came together because Rachel being Rachel, her offerings opened new mental vistas for me. Rachel, I thank you.

When I write in strong terms about the 'performance of Whiteness' in (mostly, but not exclusively) American society, I do so knowing that I have White friends who may take offense at my generalization. I understand the offense you take but I cannot apologize for it. I’m drawing a conclusion from the evidence left by hundreds of years of behavior by millions of people. I don’t even know if it’s a generalization per se or just the drawing the obvious conclusions.

The inclination towards supremacy, towards reaping where one has not planted, is what I refer to as ytppul ytppuling (YY) or the colonizer mindset. YY is Whiteness moving in the world in the way it best knows how: taking the path of least resistance, typically right through someone else's most sacred of spaces, directly to its destination. Like marauding ants through your vegetable patch, yytppuling steals your blooms, your leaves, and ultimately, your entire garden. Call it the colonizer mindset at work if that language makes you more comfortable, same difference really.

YtppuI ytppuling is, to my mind, the perfect explanation for the phenomenon that is Rachel Dolezal. I hadn’t intended ever to speak on her, but she’s come back again, this time with a new book, justisplainin’ her Columbusing of Blackness. She wandered barefoot and unwelcome, with her braids, her tan and her new African name, right into the middle of my crisis of trying to explain ytppul ytppuling, essentially offering herself as a living visual aid. Thanks. I think.

Dolezal is a helluva character. My belief is that she has read just enough history to understand and appreciate the triumphs of Blackness, and out of an abundance of admiration, and perhaps a surfeit of jealousy, she has decided that she wants to be Black. Hey, I get it. I wanna be Black too…..oh wait.

I wish I could say that I sympathize with Dolezal but in truth, I don't.

Rachel is the worst kind of fraudulent operator to me. She is not Black. This is not up for debate to my mind. She. Is. Not. Black. What she is, is a thief. She has co-opted Blackness for its apparent (cultural) benefits and sexy cool points, while wholly sidestepping its social, economic, and legal burdens. Worse still, she traffics in within-race colorism on the sly. She knows enough to understand that if folk think she’s Black, she’ll receive the deferential treatment that Black folk often mete out to light skinned women of color. She’s been known to talk about colorism, so I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that she meant to tap into Black people's own strain of anti-Blackness. She may wanna be Black but she ain’t wanna be no midnight Black. Nuh uh, she wanna be Becky with the good hair!

And when she experiences disapprobation and rejection – not on account of being Black but rather on account of the obscenity of her actions – she turns around and claims discrimination. Jumping Jehoshapat, where to start?

Worse still than the absolute asshattery of her explanations of her Blackness, her position creates a universe wherein Blackness isn't real; it's just some accessory that one can don or doff at will. Or at least, she can. Black folk can’t take theirs off but that is of no consequence.

This whole episode is just more Darth Becky on steroids shit - White privilege, White cultural appropriation, ytppul ytppuling (aka colonizer mindset) bull shiggety: #ColonizerMindsetHardAtWork. 

TheRoot.com: Three Darth Beckys all in a row

Rachel, from her clearly superior colonizer perspective, can decide to be Black and affect the pose; she can claim the benefits while escaping the challenges. As a White woman, she demanded inclusion (suing Howard University for exclusion on the grounds of race) and then when that failed, she masqueraded her way into inclusion. And she could do it all with a straight face, because whyever not?

In every way, Rachel’s story is the colonizer story: “Mine eye doth perceive it, mine heart doth want it, I therefore must have it.” Rachel wants Blackness and voilà, it is hers. The colonizer does whatever he/she must to have whatever her greedy little heart desires because it is all hers for the taking. She needs no permission and Lawd knows she will not tolerate your challenges to her logic, her excuses or her justisplanations!!

Darth Becky can center her White self even in the universe of Blackness because Whiteness is the center of the known universe. The world is Becky’s oyster and the Beckster is taking all the damn pearls. Deal with it.

The colonizer mindset, ytppul ytppuling, it’s a thing, a real thing. Rachel Dolezal is proof of that because there she is, reaping where she certainly has not sowed. This ladies & gents, is Rachel Columbusing Blackness, taking up where the original colonizer left off.

Held in the thrall of potent emotional forces

As I have tried to comprehend the election result, I came to a single conclusion: that Shakespeare was right. "There are [indeed] more things in heaven and earth, [sic] than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio.

Thinkers and writers everywhere have tried to make sense of the outcome, particularly in light of the polling data that led us all to believe another outcome was all but inevitable. In our efforts to process, much has been written about the White women's vote; the White working class men's vote; the Whites who make more than $70k vote. Writers have split the voters primarily by economic status (the list of articles on White working class male rage and dispossession is quite long) while ignoring the thing that to my mind makes the most sense to consider. It was, as far as I can tell, potent emotional forces (PEF's) that allowed voters to overlook behaviors and utterances that would, in a 'lesser' candidate, have been unoverlookable. It was those forces, that once again, got White men and women to vote for a clearly unqualified character with temperament and ethics challenges galore. It was PEFs that will keep us all from finding a firmer and more equal economic foundation for this nation.

So what are these forces? By my assessment there are at least three. First, there is the deep-seated fear of majority-minority status of Whites; an attendant concern about a shortage of resources and a (perfectly reasonable) worry about allocation of same should such a shortage actually occur. Second, is a willingness to tolerate the intolerable if that ‘intolerable’ targets some group other than my own. Third, there’s plain old odiosity*. The basket does indeed, contain some deplorables. Who knew?

PEF #1: Becoming a majority of the minority

The real psychological challenge isn’t the majority part of the maj/min status, it’s the min. 

White folk are generally very coy about racism. Many practice it on a daily basis in ways small and large, but like to pretend to be either colorblind or otherwise immune to the effects of supremacist thinking, training and a lifetime’s worth of subliminal inculcation. Never mind any and all pretense to the contrary, the current majority is well aware of the taxes that it regularly levies against POC. That knowledge alone is a sufficiently potent force that it may have driven some to vote perhaps against their own economic interests but definitely in favor of their supremacist interests. Their worry is simple: will I be treated in minority the way I’ve treated others currently in the minority? It’s a reasonable worry . There’s no telling what folk will do when the equation flips. No one can soothe frayed nerves or offer any guarantees, which, I imagine is why many voted as they did. Heaven knows, it wasn’t the Don's clearly articulated plans for dealing with income inequality or any of America’s other ailments.

PEF #2: The intolerable is tolerable if the intolerable befalls others and benefits me.

Some voters made the simple calculation that they could afford to ignore the candidate’s (now president-elect's) blatant disrespect, bullying, a history of mismanagement of companies and the willful harm done to contractors only because (i) in their heart of hearts they wish they could do (and get away with) the very same kinds of acts or (ii) they care not one whit for anyone other than themselves. The vote wasn’t about country, state or county. Nope. The vote was wholly self-preservative, and was made with the knowledge that such self-preservation would come at their neighbors’ expense. Such is the nature of the colonizer mindset I suppose - me first and if you have to die for me to be first then whoopsie. I’ll shed a tear over your grave and remember you fondly or I’ll demonize you in death and claim it was your own fault. Either way, I win.

These voters might be separated into two groups: the It’s-the-Economy-Stupid Group 1 (who don’t care about the President-Elect’s ethical and business failures) and the It’s-the-Economy-Stupid Group 2, who are too poor to care about niceties like common decency. 

Group 1 (the I-don’t-give-a-shits) has strong economic concerns, to wit, their taxes. These voters are simply not interested in any other considerations. A candidate can be as odious as he wants to be, if he’s going to positively affect their economic situation, that’s all they’re interested in. The rest is of no import. This explains why there are so many Trump voters whose average income is $70,000+. These folk don’t even notice Trump’s odiosity quotient, because nothing is of greater significance than their taxes, their pocket books, their stock portfolios. Them. If I end up brutalized in the street as a consequence of forces unleashed by their candidate, well, that’s my problem ain’t it?

Group 2 (the I’m-too-poor-to-give-a-shits) is too far gone economically to be overly concerned about integrity, decency, politesse or the rise of the alt-right. At the end of the day, these two groups’ concerns about problematic behaviors were insufficient to resist the draw of the economic argument (such as it was) being made to them. For them, the voter calculus came down to either “Where’s my (refund) check and how much is it?” or “How soon is the coal plant gonna reopen? When do I get my job back?”. 

This “Me and mine first” thinking has been at the heart of every single act of brutality in this nation’s history. America’s history isn’t past, it’s present continuous. And it’s continuing even as we speak. Some folk are lucky enough to be untouched by it, I suppose, but those people are always very few in number. Such is the power of politics. Whether we sign on or not, the winning party’s policies touch us.

  

PEF #3: Is the hired killer any more odious than the one who hires him?

If, as a voter, you were able to put your economic concerns above the real human decency challenges that the former candidate, now president-elect, presented day after day, then you may well be precisely as odious as the man you have chosen as your leader. This is not really surprising, bands of marauding jackals are not typically led by lambs.

The voters now out "Heil Trump"ing; hijab snatching; swastika painting and generally making others miserable are indeed held in the thrall of some pretty potent emotional forces, the most potent of them all: White supremacist emboldened hate. Let us not pretend. Let us also not pretend that there aren’t way more of them than any of us might have previously guessed. And they, their anger, their guns and their righteous odiosity are  a potent force with which we are going to have to deal for the foreseeable future.

Much has been written about the pain of middle America; about the anger of White men (and by extension, their wives, partners, mothers and sisters who also voted for 45 in droves) but what has not been said is that this is the very group that has, from time immemorial, benefited from the pain of others.

The reality is that ever since Christopher first Columbus'ed his way over here, the forebears of today's angry White voters have been reaping where they did not sow; planting on land they did not own; and building a nation with bricks they did not themselves fire in the kiln. 

Angry middle America was granted all manner of state and federal benefits, all of which were routinely denied and are still being denied to people of color. 

In the South, the forebears of today’s angry White voters grew rich on cotton they neither planted nor harvested off the labor of human beasts of burden whom they barely fed. So while author after author has demanded that the world acknowledge and feel their pain today, we have heard little about the pain of the oppressed groups who have largely remained oppressed; the oppressed whose boats have little risen, no matter how high the tide. White male anger is nice and all, but it ain't the only anger out there. But as always, theirs is the only anger or pain that matters. The earth screeches to a halt in the face of White pain and dispossession.

And so, here we are. 

From all indications, America is set to begin yet another era of dancing on the bones of others and expecting to feel no consequence. That right there is a whole other essay, but I'll leave that for another day, month or year maybe. 

At the end of the day, I refuse to accept that this election was based purely on economics. It was not. In the election of 2016, economics and decency were in a barroom brawl and voters picked their sides. Now, we must own the sides we chose and clean up the mess our choices will surely leave behind.

*Odiosity: hatefulness

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 [JPC1]It is also a long-standing worry.  Thomas Jefferson, in his "Notes on the State of Virginia" argued that emancipation of African people would require providing us separate land and inviting Whites from elsewhere to come to the US, because in his view, "Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."  The first part of this remark speaks to odiosity element, while the latter represents the fear Whites had of Black reprisals.  This was 1784, just 8 years after the Declaration of Independence. 

Living Life Off the Wall .....There ain’t no rules, it’s up to you

I think I’m rather unremarkable, unspectacular. I have gifts, we all do, and I try to use them to the best of my ability, we don’t all do that but we probably should. That simple pair of facts though – acknowledgment of my gifts and the decision to use them – may have caused me some distress. There are people you see, who don’t see that as you making the best of the gifts you were granted by your Creator, but see it as you being in their face…..showing off and showing them up.

I am unremarkable and yet I remember a teacher in High School when I was no more than 12, humiliating me for some hairstyle. According to her, my hair was piled up on my head. “Like,” she said nastily, “some kind of crown”. One might be inclined to ask whether there was something intrinsically wrong about me dressing my hair in a regal manner. Clearly there was some issue there for her. That was a 50+ year old teacher to a 12 year old girl for no apparent, or good, reason. And that was well before I learned to sass people, so that wasn't the cause of her annoyance. If, as unremarkable as I am I got that, I can only imagine then what Michael Jackson’s life must have been like. The haters are everywhere.

I certainly don’t mean to put myself in the same category as MJ but I think there’s something to said for the idea that people try to hurt you just because you are 'doing you' to the best of your ability. Even if you’re not as gifted as Michael Joe Jackson.

Along with the gifts come failings (quelle surprise!). Each of us pays a price for those as well. I’m inclined today to wonder whether certain people pay a higher price for their failings because they have something that others don’t: gifts and the will to try to use them? Perhaps it’s just part of that all too human need to bring others down a peg, the need to diminish others so that we can feel bigger.

Without a doubt the gloved one was talented beyond anything most of us can likely claim. Here’s a guy with singing, composition, dancing and entertainment genes, every one of which he pushed to the limit. Add to that, he was clearly disciplined and hardworking. ‘Normal’ folk usually fall down on these two traits, but it is these that determine the heights to which we will ascend. He was obviously not afraid to ascend as so many of us are. He seemed driven to it, attracted to it like the proverbial moth to the flame. This is one of many lessons we can take from Michael’s tortured life: discipline has its benefits if only we would commit ourselves to it. His discipline made him remarkable….and I'm thinking, a target for the haters.

I am unremarkable and yet I feel I have paid a price for using my gifts. So most certainly did MJ. He got off the wall and he paid a price for it. I choose not to focus on his challenges because the real truth is between him and his God, not him and me. Likewise, for each of us, our sins, foibles and peccadilloes are ultimately between us and our God. So we should all get down off the wall and get out and do the best we can, forgetting the haters. They are as ubiquitous as flies and about just as loved.

And to those who hate to see another succeed, to see another thrive, to see another ‘live their life off the wall’ I say this: don’t hate, emulate.