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Rachel Dolezal’s pick-your-race policy works brilliantly – as long as you’re white | Claire Hynes

Rachel Dolezal.
‘Great for Dolezal that she got to realise her ambition to be black. But reverse the situation, and European-style hair extensions and a white parent would not facilitate the switch.’ Photograph: Colin Mulvany/AP

Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who for more than 10 years pretended she was black, promotes herself as transracial in her new memoir, published this week. How seriously are we expected to take this latest incarnation?

Dolezal, who recently changed her name to Nkechi Diallo, a mixture of Nigerian Igbo and Fula, claims that her book, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World, was written partly “to just encourage people to be exactly who they are”. This comes two years after she was found to have deceived the people of Spokane, Washington, where she was a race activist and branch president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The book invites us to recognise Dolezal as the race equivalent of the transgender TV star Caitlyn Jenner: the casualty of a society that cast her in the wrong racial category at birth. She says that growing up with white parents and adopted black siblings, she drew pictures of herself with brown skin and curly hair.

The express-your-real-self argument appears reasonable enough on the surface, especially at a time when half of young people define gender on a spectrum. If people can transition from one gender to another, why not from one race to another? Why shouldn’t we define ourselves afresh if we feel another description better reflects our inner selves? Fluidity for everyone, right?

Dolezal is correct to argue that race is largely a social construct rather than a science. And her transracial claims flag up the difficulties around defining who we are. Many official documents ask us to classify our racialised selves using a convoluted system, as Arwa Madhawi wrote last week. The most recent census in the UK, in 2011, split our ethnic identity choices into a staggering 17 sub-groups. I’ve fluctuated across various categories over the years including “Afro-Caribbean”, “African-Caribbean”, “Black British” and “Mixed (White and Black Caribbean)”. Bizarrely, I was recently asked to describe my ethnic origin over the counter, as I applied to renew my parking permit. I replied that I couldn’t answer unless I knew the options on offer. So it’s true, as Dolezal says, that there is no fixed definition of “black” or “white” people: our monitoring system is evidence of a non-binary principle at work.

But when Dolezal was asked in a US TV interview which ethnic box she ticked, she revealed that she chose mixed black and white, “because we all have origins in the continent of Africa”. Based on this thinking, the entire world could describe itself as black. Perhaps everyone could opt, too, for the mixed category? The current craze for DNA ancestry tests reveals the diverse racial heritage typical of every white, brown and black British person. All of us could in effect classify ourselves as transracial – although the point of ethnic monitoring, surely, is not to check who feels like channelling their inner African at any given moment.

In a TEDx talk presented by Dolezal last year, she appeals to the predominantly white audience, asking: “Is the identity that you were assigned at birth the best description of who you really are and what your purpose is for being in the world?” And she urges: “What is life if we can’t draw our own pictures and write our own stories?”

Some trans rights activists have rejected Dolezal’s argument on the grounds that gender reassignment is a matter of medical necessity rather than choice. But Dolezal’s choice argument also fails because, in reality, the pick-your-own-race principle works only for a privileged minority.

Great for Dolezal that she got to realise her ambition to be black, aided by accoutrements and a black man in Idaho who agreed to play the role of father. But reverse the situation and a person of colour would be barred from entry into white society. European-style hair extensions and a white parent – real or imagined – would not facilitate the switch.

America’s “one-drop rule” historically identified any individual with a single black ancestor as black, and therefore inferior. And while most of us these days know that “racial purity” is as grounded in reality as mermaids and unicorns, the “one-drop” idea continues. Harvard University psychologists found that mixed-race individuals are still perceived as belonging to the racial group of their “lower-status” parent. Imagine the world classifying Barack Obama as a white man as a result of his white heritage? It would never happen.

When fair-skinned people of African descent “passed” into mainstream white society in the 19th and 20th century, they were not motivated by a personal quest to find themselves and live out their true essence, Dolezal-style. “Passing” was a response to extreme discrimination and oppression. What defines people of colour is a limited ability to control how we are viewed, and a lack of freedom to “write our own stories”.

Sure, race is grounded in fiction. But the biases for and against particular groups are real. To view racial identity as changeable, when the world thinks otherwise, is to risk one’s mental health. Dolezal’s trans-race argument is naivety at best – and at worst it’s dangerous.