In Full Color

by Rachel Dolezal

  What has been left in the sink?

  A.A fork

  B.Cutlery

  C.Silverware

  D.All these damn dishes

  As funny as a few of the tweets were, the humor always came at my expense. The implication was that I couldn’t possibly know the answers to the questions because I hadn’t been born and raised as a Black person. To those who wrote these tweets, I was just a pretender who may have been able to tell you all about the Freedom Riders or Queen Nzinga, but didn’t have a clue what it was like growing up “in the cut.”

  These sorts of examinations of my Blackness—as well as declarations of my perceived whiteness by others—became regular occurrences after June 11, 2015. Even though I clearly had more than a cursory knowledge about Black history and culture and didn’t relate to other Black people as an outsider but as someone who had also been subjected to microaggressions and hate crimes, a sista in the struggle, I still had to prove myself every time I spoke with a Black journalist. I was once a guest on a radio show featuring Pekela Riley, a celebrity hair stylist from Jacksonville, Florida, who specializes in Black hair and enjoys playing a wordplay game, where she gives two options and her guests have to choose one. For me, this turned into a not-so-subtle assessment of my Blackness.

  “Idris Elba or Leonardo DiCaprio?” she asked me.

  As if I’d ever pick the kid from Titanic over Stringer Bell. “Idris Elba.”

  “Mani/pedi or massage?”

  Duh. “Mani/pedi.”

  “Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter?”

  Of course, all lives mattered to me, but Black Lives Matter was the message that needed to be heard the most at that time. “Please,” I said, “I was leading the Black Lives Matter rallies here.”

  “Biggie or Tupac?”

  “Okay, now you’re trying to get me into trouble. I’ve always been a ’Pac fan and my sons like Biggie, so we have that constant conflict going on in our household, but I’ll have to go with Tupac.”

  “CNN or MSNBC?”

  “MSNBC would be my choice, but they kind of broke my heart with the Melissa Harris-Perry thing recently. But fingers crossed they turn around—”

  “And fix it. Good Times or The Jeffersons?”

  “I’ll have to go with Good Times.”

  While I understood the purpose of such tests, I looked forward to a day when I might not have to take them anymore. No matter how I responded they always left me feeling misunderstood, like I was on some sort of cultural probation. Being asked to prove myself over and over again after I’d already spent nearly two decades paying my dues brought me a great deal of pain and isolation. Adding to my loneliness was the distance that grew between me and my dad.

  During the global media firestorm, journalists had bombarded Albert with questions. A private person, he didn’t appreciate them digging into his military record and private affairs. He and his wife Amy were also dealing with some health issues at the time, and at their ages—both were in their seventies—they didn’t want the stress of having nosy reporters knocking on their door. When I told Albert I was pregnant, he grew more detached from me, responding with a chilly silence. I thought he was disappointed in me, and I felt bad that he and Amy were being inconvenienced simply for knowing me. Not wanting to burden them further by dragging them into the chaos that surrounded me, I stopped contacting them. The casual “Hey, Dad” sort of intimacy I’d previously enjoyed with Albert disappeared. So did the “Dear Daughter” cards and texts I used to get from him. With his absence from my life, I felt completely adrift, unsure if I’d ever receive unconditional love from a father figure again.

  Vilified by both the Black and white communities, I felt as isolated as I’d been growing up on the side of that mountain in Montana. I credit the baby I was carrying inside me for helping me get through that rough patch and taking care of myself. Being pregnant encouraged me to avoid self-destructive tendencies I might have been tempted to engage in and to be as healthy as possible. I made myself eat nutritious foods, drink copious amounts of water, and get lots of rest, things I probably wouldn’t have done while under this much stress had I not been pregnant. There were days—quite a few, to be honest—I wanted nothing more than to down a nice Olivia Pope–sized glass of cabernet to help me unwind from all the tension I was carrying, but, being pregnant, I obviously couldn’t do that. In loving my baby, I was loving myself. I felt like he and I—yes, he; doctors had confirmed I was having a boy—were taking a special journey together, as his birth was not only going to represent a new beginning for him but for me as well.

  I took particular delight in the fact that my baby’s estimated due date fell on February 14, which was Frederick Douglass’ birthday and fell right in the middle of Black History Month. Franklin, Izaiah, and Esther were all present at his birth. Esther actually held up my left leg as I pushed the baby out. Unlike Franklin’s ninety-four-hour labor and delivery, this one only took ten hours. My baby was born naturally and full-term, arriving two days after the estimated due date.

  I’d made a short list of boys’ names but only one felt right: Langston Attickus. The middle name was an homage to Crispus Attucks, a Black man from Boston who was the first casualty of the American Revolutionary War and crossed the color line after he died by being buried in a whites-only cemetery, and to Atticus Finch, the protagonist’s father in To Kill a Mockingbird who, as a lawyer, agreed to defend a Black man who had been accused of raping a white woman. The first name was a tribute to the celebrated Black poet, writer, and leader of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes, who was also born in February. In particular, I was inspired by Hughes’ “Mother to Son,” a hopeful poem that acknowledges life’s many hardships and celebrates perseverance. I’d always admired Hughes’ poetry, which to me felt like a form of activism and revolution during an era when white supremacy was widespread and in many places openly supported. Hughes was known as “the people’s poet.” His words were like food to the Black community, and they continue to nourish those who read them today.

  As beautiful as Langston’s birth was, it also required me to revisit one of the great fallacies of our society, which had plagued me my entire life: our government’s demand for us to check boxes on legal forms categorizing ourselves in certain ways. Hardly a minute passes after we’re born before we’re assigned a name, a sex and therefore a gender, and a race. Our identities are assumed to be accurate based on the testimony of others. As we grow, more boxes are added to the forms we’re constantly filling out: religion, sexual orientation, age, language. Many of us come to understand that these boxes hold very little meaning compared to the way we actually feel about ourselves. Time and time again, these narrow categories have proven to cause more harm than good. At the end of the day, we’re all part of the same group: human.

  After how much attention the way I’d checked the race category on the application for the police ombudsman position had gotten, I knew that how I chose to racially categorize Langston on his birth certificate application was likely to attract scrutiny. Langston’s father was Black, but in Washington State, the way the mother identified was by default the way her child was identified. I selected WHITE and BLACK for Langston because, while I acknowledged that I had some visibly European phenotypes, I also remained unapologetically Black and I refused to allow a form to whitewash my son’s identity.

  Several weeks later, while taking Langston to see a pediatric urologist, I was asked to fill out an intake form and saw that, unlike some medical forms that state “Check all that apply” or include an “Other” category, this one required me to choose a single race. No matter how I chose to fill out the form, I felt like it would have contained a degree of inaccuracy, because I believed that the premise of race was flawed and that using one parent’s racial identity to determine a child’s racial identity was flawed as well. That these forms and the racial categories on them differed from office to office and state to state was indicative of how weak a foundation the idea
of race rested upon and, as a consequence, how prone definitions based on that idea were to falling apart.

  Langston’s birth also succeeded in reigniting the animosity that had been directed at me for nearly a decade and that had become especially virulent after the previous summer. On Twitter, some hateful person hiding behind the handle @7YearOlds responded to a photo I’d posted of Langston wearing Mickey Mouse pajamas and sleeping in an infant swing by writing, “I hope someone puts a gun in his mouth and blows his dirty little nigger brains all over your stupid white ass!” Commenting on a photo of Langston’s feet, the same vile person wrote, “Why do I see pictures of your stupid nigger sons [sic] bare ass feet? Those should be work boots I see!”

  What kind of world were we living in that someone could direct this kind of hatred toward a mother and her newborn baby? As young Black men in America, Franklin and Izaiah had already faced such hostility many times in their short lives. I wished I could have made the world a better place for Langston to grow up in, but with my voice largely silenced by the fabricated scandal involving me, I was going to have to live with shielding him from the pain and teaching him how to redirect the fear and anger he was inevitably going to experience.

  During my pregnancy, I painted some inspirational art for Langston’s nursery and wrote letters to him as a way of preparing him for the world he was about to enter. As the mother of two Black sons, I knew how hard life could be for them, and unless a great change came over our society, I feared it would be much the same for Langston. My hope was that if for some reason I weren’t around to advise him in the future, he could look at these paintings and read these letters and find comfort in the images I’d created and the words I’d written. In my letters, I warned him about the scorn and hate that came from being Black and living in a predominately white environment. From my own experience, I knew how incredibly painful it was to have your body constantly being appraised according to someone else’s calculus while your true essence was ignored. I advised him to shut out the noise as best he could and stay focused on his own truth. Who you know yourself to be, I reminded him, was far more important than how you appear to others.

  I also told Langston how important it was to be clear about right and wrong and to own up to any mistakes he might make. I recalled some of the mistakes I’d made in my own life: making decisions based on fear, spending too many years trying to be what other people wanted me to be, and not having the courage to talk about my past out of fear of rejection. I’ve always been a very straightforward and honest person who has strived to balance the ethics of what is true to say with compassion regarding what is kind to say and wisdom in knowing what is necessary to say. Yes, there have been many times when I’ve failed to strike this balance and made mistakes. I wish there could have been a way for me to be 100 percent truthful about my identity while being 100 percent understood and accepted by others, but I always felt like I had to trade one for the other. I had the joy of living and being seen as who I truly am for five years, but to do that I had to gloss over or hide much of my complex past in favor of simpler stories that I felt would make more sense to other people. I am by no means perfect, but I’ve finally matured enough to accept imperfections as being an integral part of growing.

  At the same time, I told Langston, it’s just as important to be able to separate the harm you’ve caused from the harm created by other people. I’d spent too much of my life beating myself up for “mistakes” that weren’t actually my fault and punishing myself with shame and guilt forced on me by other people. As part of my healing process from sexual and psychological traumas in my past, I’d come to understand the importance of not holding myself accountable for the perpetrators’ actions. Now, after getting skewered by the press and the general public, I refused to take on more than my fair share of the blame, and if Langston were ever put in a similar position, I hoped he would do the same.

  The most important piece of advice I gave him involved finding ways to get through the hard times he was sure to experience in his life. Sometimes these moments only last five minutes, I told him, other times five days, or even five years, but they will always come to an end eventually. Take care of yourself and focus on getting through the day. As much as the passing of time brings us one step closer to death, it can also be a gift. The sun will always set in the evening, bringing even the worst day to an end, and it will always rise again the next morning, offering the possibility of a better one.

  If you feel like you’re stuck in a dark tunnel that has no end, I reminded him, take it moment by moment, and soon those moments will turn into minutes and the minutes will become hours and the hours days and the days weeks, and you’ll eventually make it to the other side, where a new beginning lies. When you experience a series of hardships, you can get overwhelmed by a cumulative sense of sadness. Don’t succumb to it. Even when your feet feel like open wounds and your legs have turned to jelly, keep moving forward. Endurance, perseverance, and willpower will be your greatest allies. If someone’s not there to hold you up and guide you, you’ll have to dig deep and force yourself to keep putting one foot in front of the other. If you do that, you’ll eventually reach the end of the tunnel, no matter how long and cold and desolate it is. If you give in to the pain and take a break, it will only make the journey longer and harder. If you stop and sit down, you may never stand up again.

  Keep moving forward and don’t ever give up.

  Epilogue

  WHEN I TELL PEOPLE I STILL IDENTIFY AS BLACK, they want to know why. I explain that Black is the closest descriptive category that represents the essential essence of who I am. For me, Blackness is more than a set of racialized physical features. It involves acknowledging our common human ancestry with roots in Africa. It means fighting for freedom, equality, and justice for people of African heritage around the world. And it requires understanding the legacy and context of Blackness beyond the physical into the realms of the spiritual, psychological, historical, and emotional. I know from personal experience that our true selves consist of much more than the color of our skin or the texture of our hair. It’s the culture we choose to inhabit, the lives we choose to live, and the way we’re perceived and treated by others. From these experiences, our identities are formed. When my friend Nikki in college, multiple boyfriends and girlfriends, and a professor at Whitworth all made statements to the effect of “Rachel is Blacker than most Black people”—something that still happens to this day—they clearly weren’t talking about my complexion or my hair. They were pointing to my commitment to the cause of racial and social justice, my work on behalf of the Black community, and the sense of self it took me multiple decades to fully embrace.

  For me, being Black isn’t playing dress-up. It’s not something I change in and out of or do only when it’s convenient. This is who I am. It’s the culmination of a lifelong journey during which I’ve experienced as much heartbreak as I have joy. I doubt I’ll ever speak to Larry, Ruthanne, or Uncle Dan ever again, although I recently reconnected with “Uncle” Vern, who confirmed what I’d suspected: that Larry and Ruthanne had intentionally discredited me in an attempt to get Josh’s sexual assault charges removed. “I’m not them,” he assured me.

  My relationships with Ezra and Zach continue to be strained. I haven’t spoken to Ezra since I unfriended him on Facebook in 2013 and Zach since March 2015, when he asked me if I could cosign a loan with him so he could buy a new truck. Despite our differences, I remain hopeful that we’ll reach an understanding one day and their wounds will heal. They are still the same little babies I once bathed, fed, and rocked to sleep. Out of love, I have already forgiven them.

  As hard as it was to sever ties with some members of my biological family, it’s been even harder to lose members of my chosen one, so my heart was warmed when my dad reached out to me to offer his love and support after he saw me on television in April 2016. “I just watched the Today show,” Albert texted me. “I think you did great and I love the way you answered t
he questions! I have always known you would do good for the human race. No one is perfect and your story will add an important part to history. I wish you the best and will do anything for you if I can. Love to the boys and you.” The tears rolling down my cheeks were quickly replaced by one of the biggest smiles I’d had in a very long time.

  My sons and my sister continue to be great pillars of support for me. After the public backlash against me, I had Franklin transferred to a new middle school, where he could get a fresh start. Now in high school, he’s getting good grades and plays on the football team. Still hoping to pursue a career in film or television, he’d like to study acting at UCLA.

  Taking full advantage of the University of Idaho’s study abroad program, Izaiah is currently taking classes in South Africa after spending a semester in Spain. Majoring in international studies, sociology, and Spanish, he’s been on the dean’s list every semester and hopes to go to law school when he’s done with his undergraduate work.

  Before he’d even turned one, Langston had already racked up an impressive amount of frequent flier miles, having accompanied me on trips to New York for my second appearance on Today, Dallas for a festival, London for a BBC interview, and Antigua for the launch of a nonprofit for which I remain a board member at-large. Ahead of schedule for all the important baby milestones, he even tries to count to ten in French along with Franklin. He is the sunshine that brightens all our days.

  Even though Esther never got her time in court, she refuses to let it hold her back. Like me, she’s a survivor. She continues to live in Spokane, where she works on a hemp farm and teaches piano lessons. I still do her hair every other month, and she stops by regularly to play with her nephew.