James' World 2

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Rachel Dolezal never surprised me in the slightest. A white woman who masqueraded as Black while leading a N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Washington State about 12 years ago, she was an almost inevitable sign of our times.

So Hannah Gann needn’t surprise us either. Gann is a 34-year-old public-school teacher and activist in Philadelphia who grew up white, Jewish and affluent but for years has falsely claimed to be of Black (Tunisian) and Palestinian descent. She was a prominent advocate of the Palestinian cause, so forceful as to have been accused of antisemitism. Fellow activists outed her last month and she has acknowledged lying.

Gann is an ideological descendant of Dolezal, who grew up white in Montana in the 1980s and ’90s and started “identifying” as Black some years after completing a master’s degree at Howard University, a historically Black school. Wearing her hair in Black American styles and sporting a spray tan or using bronzer — the one thing besides membership in Homo sapiens that she shares with Donald Trump — she claimed to have a Black father. Her parents outed her as white in 2015, but she dug in her heels. She now goes by the name Nkechi Diallo and has said that she is “not white” but “transracial.”

There have been other such cases between Dolezal’s outing and Gann’s. Remember Jessica Krug, the white woman from Kansas passing as a Blacktina from the Bronx? Krug taught history at George Washington University, studied Blackness and published a well-reviewed book. She called herself “Jess la Bombalera” on social media, affecting a New York Latino accent in posts defending her indigent Bronx “brothers and sisters.” She resigned from George Washington in 2020 after admitting her deception.

There was also Satchuel Paigelyn Cole, a white social justice activist who confessed in 2020 that she had posed as Black. And there was CV Vitolo-Haddad, a white grad student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who resigned from a teaching post in 2020 after admitting to have pretended to be a person of color.

These cases suggest a subtype of modern white identity. For this person, the commitment to contesting the evil of whiteness is all-consuming, an ideological North Star that orients her entire worldview. It is an extreme expression of the outlook that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called “Woke 1,” in which the world is always neatly divided into wicked white oppressors and virtuous nonwhite victims. For a white person with these beliefs, it is a short step to wanting not to be white, to escape the original sin of that privilege.

To be the victim is to be not just innocent but also more interesting. It also can provide a sense of meaning in a modern world that no longer gives ready answers to the question of life’s purpose. “Who am I? What am I for? I’m … Black!” The decision may be eccentric — skin darkening as part of your morning routine? — but it is hardly counterintuitive.

In the pre-woke days, I knew a couple of intermediate cases. These were white women who embraced Black culture, dated Black men exclusively, used “blaccents” spontaneously and deep down seemed to wish they were Black. (Why these cases seem to almost always involve women is an interesting question to which I don’t have an answer.) But these women held off from claiming to be Black — restrained by an awareness that they not only lacked the right ancestry but also hadn’t grown up with the social disadvantages that Blackness so often entails.

It is not surprising, then, that Dolezal, in taking the extra step, told many stories of suffering racist abuse. Even after being outed, she claimed that growing up, she and her siblings (some of whom were adopted and Black) were beaten by her white mother and stepfather, who, she said, “would punish us by skin complexion.” (This story — including the claim that she had a stepfather — has been denied by family members.)

Such stories would seem to be Dolezal’s way of appropriating oppression as a mark of Blackness — offering her a path to feeling justified in claiming Blackness that those women I knew in the pre-woke days would not have taken.

Every time one of these cases turns up, it reminds me, ironically, of how much racial progress we have made in America. There was no procession of Dolezals in, say, the 1950s. No matter how leftist your politics, you would never have chosen to live as a Black person. This underscores how very much easier being Black is today than it once was, regardless of the challenges that remain. I doubt any white person claiming Blackness in the old days would have lasted more than a month.

There were some interesting almost-exceptions. The white jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow called himself a “voluntary Negro” starting in the 1920s and married a Black woman, but he did not claim to actually be Black. And in the 1880s, the white geologist Clarence King married a former slave and told her he was Black, but he lived as white outside the household.

Modern cases like Gann’s are something else. And because the fetishizing of Blackness and the reviling of whiteness is a natural outgrowth of our progressive intelligentsia’s worldview, I see little that will stop them from appearing from time to time. While Krug disappeared from public life, Dolezal presses on in her simulation, and recently said she’d like to sit down for a meal with Gann. Perhaps Gann, too, will ultimately decide that her self-identification as Black and Palestinian is valid, regardless of biology and family history.

This sort of thing will remain rare but never go extinct — no more perplexing than the occasional four-leaf clover. Get ready for another case in a year or three.

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Ricardo Tomás

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