Part of the reason I sought entrance to a community fighting for the rights of people other than my own is because of the way I was raised. It’s hard to grow up in a Jewish family without some understanding of persecution. There were several family parties where, after cocktail number three, my aged cousin Bernie would begin lamenting how many of our distant relatives were killed in the Holocaust. It was always a bit of a buzzkill, but also a reality check. So, raised with a sense of what injustice was, but without having experienced much of it myself, I took on the cause of another race.
Similarly, Dolezal grew up with black adopted brothers and attended predominantly black colleges. Like her, I grew up in an environment that was not solely white. When I was 4, I was the flower girl as my uncle married an African woman, and it was hardly the first or the last interracial marriage in our family. My grandmother was a Civil Rights activist, and both of my parents attended Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Suffice it to say, I didn’t grow up thinking it was weird to be an activist for black rights or that it was a challenge to find a multiracial environment. One of the gifts of ethnic ambiguity is that I have been able to effortlessly form friendships that exist outside of racial boundaries and tension, and become intimate with other cultures. While I don’t agree with Dolezal’s actions, I do think we have that in common: the refusal to live in cultural isolation.
I live in Los Angeles now, which is very diverse but also more segregated than the New York of my childhood. For the first time in my life, I don’t have many non-white friends that I see on a regular basis. This makes me sad. I hope to eventually find in L.A. what I once had in New York. This time, however, I’ll go in without the delusion that I am a Black Panther, and without, for the love of God — and I hope you’re listening, Dolezal — tribal-print head wraps.
Hannah Miet is a Brooklyn-born journalist and nonfiction writer living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Rumpus.
Article Appeared @http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/06/16/im-a-white-woman-who-dated-a-black-panther-i-could-have-been-rachel-dolezal/?hpid=z9