For my blog post this week, the questions I will be addressing are: What visual cues do we use to determine someone’s race or gender and what has shaped my own ideas of race and gender that inform how you perceive someone’s racial or gender identity? I’m going to specifically look at the racial aspect of this as I looked into the instances with Rachel Dolezal. The issue surrounding the incident with Dolezal was that she was a biological white woman, born into a family with white parents and adopted black siblings. As an adult, Dolezal got to a point where she started to identify herself as black. When comparing pictures of her past with her present, she had visibly darker skin and had changed her hair to resemble a black woman’s.

As a culture, we are certainly taught to look at a person’s race as the color of their skin, almost always in comparison to that of someone who identifies as Caucasian. I also find myself looking at their features; i.e. how tall they are, their hair, facial features, what they wear and so forth. I’m not condoning this behavior, but we all analyze different people. This analysis is what often leads us to perceive someone’s race. From the outside, many times the perception of someone’s race comes from their appearance. In order to confirm our assumptions, we then often times look to the actions of the individual. When people behave differently than us, on top of looking differently, we have a tendency to classify them as a different race than us. It’s almost like a way to be superior or stand out from other people.

I think I do a good job at trying to look at the ethnicity of the person, but skin color does play a large role in how my mind groups people. I try my best not to make assumptions based off of the color of people’s skin, but rather their actions. I’ve learned through my own experiences that the world is not color blind. We all look different, whether that’s olive or peach, tan or pale, black or white, we notice the color of people’s skin. It’s how you treat that person is what defines your own perception of race. For me personally, another idea that has helped me shape my perception of race is culture. I think it can be hard to sometimes classify someone based off of the color of the skin, but rather the culture that they grew up in. To describe someone’s skin color doesn’t allow for an understanding of where the person came from, what kind of life they lived, and what traditions are carried out in their daily activities.

With the case of Ms. Dolezal, she was a born white woman, who in turn identifies as black. The case she makes is that her experiences and the feeling she has inside is why she identifies as black. I think this is an interesting perspective on race. With that being said, if she felt that way inside, was there a need to change her outward appearance? Race so often is looked at by the appearance of someone, so it’s possible that she wanted to be accepted in her feelings, almost an act of wanted validation. Is it okay that she changed her race? I’m not sure. It’s along the same question of, is it okay for someone to change their gender? Now a day, that is a much more accepted change in someone’s life rather than their race.

I do not know if anyone will ever know the truth behind why Ms. Dolezal decided to change her race identification. When reading and listening to her story, it’s interesting to learn that although her outward appearance correlates more towards someone who would identify as black, there was a large portion of people in the black community that disagreed. Which leads me to believe that there is more to race than the outward appearance of someone. I don’t know what the “thing” is that makes each racial identification appropriate. Although we use so much of our perception of race as an outward appearance, that is clearly not enough to change in order to identify as a different race than you were born with. Interestingly enough, Ms. Dolezal painted a picture of children being more accepting of her appearance than adults. Maybe as the next generation comes it will be more accepted to change one’s appearance and racial identification.