OPINION:
Wishful thinking has its uses. It can ward off the blues, encourage ambition, and even entertain (in small doses). But wishful thinking is, after all, only a daydream. It can’t turn water into wine, a fumble into a touchdown, or a white woman into a black woman, however hard she may wish it so. There’s reality, sometimes dull and sometimes painful, but real all the same. Wishful thinking can deteriorate into delusion, and that’s not good.
Rachel Dolezal, who until this week was the president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, fashioned a career with wishful thinking. Ms. Dolezal “passed” as black until she ran headlong into reality when reporters uncovered the fact that she’s actually white. Her blue eyes might have raised suspicion, but it was her parents who outed her, telling reporters that she is actually descended from German and Czech stock.
Photographs of her as a freckled-faced teenager with golden locks contrast with her current look, her head wreathed in Afro ringlets. The deception crumbled soon after Ms. Dolezal filed a police report that she was the victim of a hate crime, that she had received mail with intimidating references to a lynching. When investigators inquired about her status as a black person, her parents said she was not an American descended from Africa.
The revelation led to a media uproar and she resigned her NAACP position, without apology for lying. She explained on NBC’s “Today” show that she felt a spiritual connection with the black culture. “I’m definitely not white … I identify as black.” Her parents had adopted four black children and raised them in a household where race didn’t count, which obviously influenced her attraction to the black culture. Her advocacy for minority causes and her work with the NAACP is commendable, but did not require posing, or “identifying,” as she calls it, as a black person. Most of the founders of the NAACP were white, and the organization includes many white members.
Long before she claimed to be the victim of a hate crime that was undone by her white complexion, she once said she was a victim of discrimination as a white person at Howard University, which is predominantly black. She showed friends a photograph of herself with a black man who she said was her father.
As Hillary Rodham Clinton might say, “what difference, at this point, does it make?” Ms. Dolezal might have been confused by the reality of the present age when a lie can successfully pose as a fact, when a man can become a woman simply by saying he is, when the idea of marriage is turned upside down, when everyone is encouraged to reimagine himself to be whatever he wants to be. But reality does matter so long as human beings live in community and share an obligation to uphold the common good. What a man or woman says and does make an impact on others. Life is not a solipsism, the philosophical fantasy that says the only certainty is the existence of one’s own mind. A person only has to pinch himself hard — or get pinched hard by someone else — to learn that bad behavior has real consequences.
Truth is the foundation for trust, necessary for successful human relationships. It was not Ms. Dolezal’s lie that undid her, but her delusion and the refusal of her family and her colleagues to follow her into la-la land. The reality is not simply her daughter’s identity, her mother said, but her integrity. Integrity, like reality, matters.
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