Tonight, I attended GRF Sam’s Table Talk about transracialism and transgender identity. Like many others at the talk, I had chosen to attend because I was relatively familiar with the scandal caused several years ago by Rachel Dolezal coming out as “transracial,” but I had wanted to hear other people’s opinions. As the president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP, Dolezal had identified publicly as a black woman. She came under media fire after her parents announced that she was actually Caucasian by birth, and since then Dolezal has professed to considering herself black despite having almost entirely European heritage. This caused a sensation and a huge backlash, and after doing some more research on her, I am even more shocked: in her memoir, Dolezal goes as far as comparing her experiences to slavery.

In general, people at the table talk were in agreement that Dolezal was wrong in claiming a black identity, especially as a white women. One particularly questionable aspect of Dolezal’s behavior and the further controversies it raises is the fact that she comes from a position of power and privilege and, by choosing to alter her appearance in order to identify as a different race, she not only ignores the struggles that people of that group have faced but she also potentially objectifies and fetishizes their culture. To this effect, we discussed some of the questions of cultural appropriation that have resulted from this scandal. In terms of being transgender versus transracial, we discussed how both gender and race are, to an extent, social constructs, but gender potentially has more of a basis in biology than race and thus the concept of being transgender has more validity.