Feminism and the Impasse of Whiteness; or, Who's Afraid of Rachel Doležal?

Abstract

Who can forget Rachel Doležal—the Africana Studies instructor and head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP who was outed in 2015 as “born white to white parents” after years of presenting herself as a light-skinned Black woman. By taking up the controversies that have followed Doležal, this paper considers the multifaceted ways that she constitutes a quintessential bad feminist object, even as her “alibi” (which is more a defense) draws on academic feminism's own anti-essentialist investment in social constructionist theories of race and racial identity. In doing so, I am not interested in condoning or rescuing Doležal from critical condemnation but in exploring the problem of thinking about Rachel Doležal for feminist analysis.