Santa Clara University School of Law faculty members Margalynne Armstrong and Stephanie Wildman co-authored an editorial on issues of racial identity related to recent questions about the topic in the media:
What is race? Who decides what race a person is? Should a person be able to decide her race for herself? These questions — posed to students on Day One of our law school’s Race and the Law class — arose with a vengeance last week, when the parents of Spokane, Wash., NAACP chief Rachel Dolezal revealed her to be racially white — not the African American woman she held herself out to be.
Even after Dolezal quit her NAACP job, she continued to claim in interviews that she “identifies as black,” not backing down from her insistence that she has the right to assert her racial identity.
What Dolezal is learning the hard way is that, in our public lives, most of us cannot decide our race. Society places us into a racial category based upon our physical features. Dolezal must have known this, as she changed her outward appearance from a tow-haired child to a tanned, dark curly-haired adult.
The full editorial may be read at the San Francisco Chronicle.
