In this week’s blog post, I choose Rachel Dolezal’s story to discuss my opinion about what visual cues do we use to determine someone’s race or gender and what has shaped my ideas of race and gender that inform how you perceive someone’s racial or gender identity. Rachel Dolezal’s story is pretty shocking for me, since Dolezal identify herself as an African American woman while she actually has no verifiable African ancestry. In the article and the MSNBC interview, I noticed that the wording of the media is not very friendly, like “unbelievably incoherent”, “nonsense and ever-unspooling deceptions”, and “her charade”. From the media point of view, they believed that Rachel Dolezal just want to be followed by public and all the words she said is lies. In Dolezal’s life, she actually stopped talked with her mother and excluded herself from her original family.

When people talked about changing race in acquired state, Michael Jackson is the one that we cannot ignore it. All the rumor about Jackson that he felt shame about his skin, and he decided to blench it. In fact, Jackson’s skin disorder that destroys his original skin and people should treated it like a symptom of a kind of disease. In Jackson and Dolezal’s story, we can see that most people identify the color of skin with the identity of a person’s race. However, Dolezal personally think her race is African American not European and Jackson declared himself as an African American even it is hard to tell from the color of his skin. In my opinion, I think most people identify their race in their growing experience, DNA, and social definition. For example, I firmly believe that I am an Asian and I won’t change my race in rest of my life. The difference of DNA clearly distinguishes each person’s race by a glimpse. In the second point, the history also makes our race and I believe fundamental of racial discrimination is factor of history. For example, slave-owners and the large slave population in the American Civil War, the suffering of Jews in World War II, and the British colonial period in India. People can clearly understand the story of their ancestors and ancestors of other races by the conflicts of these history (the reason included racism and other reasons). 

In Dolezal’s interview, she said that she felt isolated with her identity and no one can understand her. Dolezal didn’t say why she changed her race and why being an African American, not other race groups. She just firmly declared that she is an African American and it makes me very confused because I believe it must have some reason behind Dolezal. Probably, the reason is she selected her own race because she cannot get a racial identity among Europeans. Or she just wants to be whatever she wants to be if we turn the race into gender (people may believe her ideas more than simply think she is a liar). I think most people can feel coherent in their race and they feel incoherent in different race and countries. 

In the interview, the host also discussed about “culture appropriation” with Dolezal. Culture behind each race include a long period of history, religion, social background. Culture appropriation based on the incoherent from African American to Dolezal’s identity. Dolezal also mentioned Iggy Azalea, one of the famous female rappers in nowadays. Iggy Azalea also have been disputed because she is a white woman with her African American accent. In China, some young people will choose to compile dreadlocks to show that they are the trend look which dreadlocks should be physical characteristic in African. 

Is such a thing happen more widespread in the future? And racial transitions will become a reasonable phenomenon as transgender. The answer is I’m not sure. The only thing I can confirm is the situation that racial transitions faces is very challenge and complicate. If this happens, what do you think of it?