I told my boyfriend that I was disappointed by my writing. “It’s distant because you’re not pretending to be anything other than on the outside” of the issue, he said. “You’re being honest.” He said I should try writing about being white if I wanted something more real to come out. I didn’t take his advice at the time (though maybe I am now), and never read the poem to anyone.
My boyfriend had trouble with other white members of the group whose poems and songs were first person. He struggled with the fact they were nice people who ultimately wanted to help the black cause, but would do so while writing poems that refer to “our people” and “our struggle.” It made him angry to see people that had no experience with racism talk about it as if they did. It was an issue close to him and his life, one that he couldn’t escape by wearing different clothes or by changing his hair, which he wore in long dreads. Being a good ally, he said, meant supporting those going through these issues as someone who is not also going through them.
I don’t know if he knew how much I needed to hear that, but it stopped my identity crisis in its tracks, before I reached anything near Dolezal levels of delusion. By my junior year of college, I was favoring the librarian-with-a-Jew-fro look over my former Jamaican-inspired swagger.
But my period of confusion allows me to have some empathy for Dolezal, even if I lack sympathy for her lies. I don’t have the credentials to analyze her, but I do have the grounds to analyze myself.