"We need to be compassionate"
*Please be advised this is prose. It is a piece I wrote a year ago as a way to process. It is a form of personal testimony.
“We need to be compassionate”
They all kept saying this
For that Rachel…Rachel Dolezal
You must be outside your mind
Compassionate for a liar?!
For a woman not held accountable for her actions of deceit deception and theft
Yes theft!
She stole the stories of my ancestors—hell your ancestors in order to gain your trust, our trust to speak for us
“if it is about us, without us, it is not for us” this is a proverb from the motherland, our motherland not hers
You stood beside her, behind her, under the guise that she spoke for you and with you as a sister of the struggle as a daughter of the struggle as a mother of the struggle
She stole the struggle
Acculturated the Black struggle to make money, to make a name for herself, to spread our names to make her name
Spokane became her pulpit for a voice of black power from a white mouth in color—IN color
You say be compassionate… I can only assume you say this because you are not ready to realize you’ve been duped and you don’t want to allow the embarrassment of acceptance of a new form of white supremacy in the black community that has been a major force in the Native community since the colonial invasion. Ain’t you heard? Whites have been playing Indian since … well ever since.
Rachel Dolezal, MFA, yes MFA. She always made it clear to be referenced that way in order for people to recognize her important terminal degree, so I’m putting it here. She is a woman IN color. She painted herself Black… well a light hue to pass as a black woman that could pass for white in order to benefit from our black oppression to earn a monetary living in Spokane. Paid in tokens. Trained in art. Trained in camouflage. She truly earned that degree. So successful that she took away opportunities from real black women. Sometimes in front of other people— people of color. There was always silence. Silent support for her, always for her.
She had the power of white supremacy even when she was in her woman IN color state. People of color did not even step up for other women of color in Spokane when she stole from them or stepped on them. Hell some defended her instead! I always wondered how she carried such a presence of silencing those that should support, that usually would support… but now it is clear—it was a privilege in the knapsack that was indeed invisible because it was hidden even to the usually aware audience. Yet even invisible and hidden white privilege rears its ugly head.
Such as when a group comes together to discuss our community feelings about an international scandal in which a white woman pretended to be a black woman, obtained jobs and positions in the community under the premise that she was indeed a black woman and led communities of color, and she most possibly sent racist death threats to herself in the mail –federal offense and has harassed a staff member of a police ombudsman office and those of us that felt violated by the way in which this woman appropriated the black race, the native race and people of color in general are silenced. But she is heard.
Where is the compassion for us?
Where is the compassion for us?
You say she has cancer… she ain’t got cancer now. She might have had cancer before but the key term is might. I don’t tread light with that. Neither should you.
You say she had a terrible home life… well truth be told we don’t know. Two sides to every story and only her side out of 4 that we have heard say the terrible things she says are true.
You say she did great things for the Black community. Perhaps she started great things, but did she not also stir up things? Did she not also burn bridges? Did she not also stop other qualified women of color from participating in Spokane social justice spaces? Did not women of color get dismissed because all that was needed was her?
I am tired of getting these unsolicited requests to be on committees that did not seem to need me before. Or to return to a committee that I went to once but when I was there my dark brown skin was invisible and my black volumed voice was silenced when she arrived late and even after she exited early. I’ve read ya’ll emails about not making a statement on the issue of her because she was an active person in your group. Oh how I want to drop a line in your email chain about your blatant dismissal of me and another woman of color in the exact same way at a different meeting. I know because we talk. There ain’t many of us.
You say you want to speak with her and hear her story? Have you not heard her side and her story? Hell she told her story all over Spokane for years. But don’t you remember she got paid to go across country right after she conveniently resigned from the NAACP. She told her story on various networks to the world. Why don’t you go ask your friend why she didn’t talk to Spokane here in Spokane? I’m sure if you’re compassionate she’ll respond... just bring your wallet. And once again the Rachel show will commence.
So can those of us get your compassion first? Can we wait for her compassion until the day she shows respect and acknowledges Spokane? Acknowledges her crimes against the very people she claimed to be helping and speaking for… rather on behalf of.
She bitched and moaned about how whites stepped at the front of the marches in Spokane for Black Lives Matter and how that was inappropriate and how dare they steal the cause. When will we take her own words and tell her, How dare she take our cause.
She has done the very crime she has boasted to hate! Yet you want us to be compassionate? Why because she colored herself a light light brown and pretended to be one of us?
Damn, perhaps it’s more than her that has a self hatred around here.
Perhaps it’s more than just her that needs to reassess what institutional racism really is and who indeed are the perpetrators and when oppression is actually rearing its head and it is working so well to pin the oppressed against the oppressed
Creating a house mentality against a field mentality
Rachel Dolezal wanted people to believe she was in the field. Yet her skin showed the house.
In her eyes, despite my dark skin, I was in the house because of my education, you know it was not from an HBCU, that she sued because she was White, but later would use it as clout for being “down,” but I am Ivy. I was house because I did not struggle enough financially because I had a full time job with benefits. I was house because I am married to a black man in Spokane. And because my story was not sad and tormenting enough—well we all know it is always the Rachel show and I can’t even tell my story because she got a story to one up yours before your story even begins. Perhaps she got a bad story, but once again will the truth ever be known as chronologically She has never truly told her story. Her brother told the world that when she should have been in South Africa, she was getting that “Black personality” degree from Howard she would rub in our face…
No more whites need to lie about the motherland.
Her lies are not white lies. They have always been dark, very Black as that has been her definition and association of her Blackness. And the measurement of the “blackness” of Black people she interacted with from day to day.
Compassion ends there, with her “my black is blacker than your black, because I struggled more… but shhh I’m talking” white privilege.
“my black is blacker than your black, because I struggled more… but shhh I’m talking” white privilege.
NAACP Spokane Chapter Freedom Fund Banquet 2014. Before her presidency. A few months before I woke up about her deceptive ways (not her racial identity) and those in my overall environment.
This is a prose piece I wrote last year after Rachel Dolezal became famous for cultural appropriation. The Spokane community, a community I lived in and still live in today, had a town forum for those who wanted to discuss the issue and move on. Many people continually said how "we must be compassionate" for her. I did not speak at this forum, but this piece that I wrote a day or so later shares my reflections. These are my own reflections, from my own experiences with her and within the Spokane community and work environment with Dolezal. After a year of holding this piece in limbo, the realization that she is still banking on this appropriation allows me to feel fully in my right to share.