Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Race frauds are not new in Indian Country

No matter how you look at it Rachel Dolezal pissed off a lot of people.

Of course for all the handwringing, Indian country was quick to point out that for Indians this is a very old story. Dolezal-style ethnic fraud is arguably what most Indians would think of as a form of cultural appropriation, a phrase we seem to increasingly be hearing in the black community as well.

Whether one thinks of Rachel Dolezal as transracial, a liar, mentally unstable, or simply an ethnic fraud, at the center of this identity politics issue is the American obsession with racial and cultural authenticity. The central questions are: is Dolezal’s claim to blackness legitimate? What does it take to be an “authentic black person,” and how do we define authentic?

The American obsession with black authenticity is related to Indian authenticity, and it is tied to “blood” purity. The difference is that for blacks the one drop rule applies, while Indians are required to prove a minimum (and often arbitrary) amount of “blood” to qualify as legitimately Indian. Less blood quantum, less authenticity. For Indians there is an even more complicated dynamic that equates authenticity with cultural purity: not only are “real” Indians those who fit a stereotypically Indian profile, they also live in “pure” cultures untouched by the modern world. In other words, real Indians only exist in a noble but tragic by-gone past. Modern Indians can never be authentic because they have been corrupted by modernity.

But there is another element to this unattainable authenticity. It is about what the American fixation on Indian racial and cultural authenticity says about white Americans’ own identity. Native scholars such as Phillip Deloria and Shari Huhndorf have written most brilliantly on this. Americans as settlers and descendents of settlers (whites in particular) have struggled to form their own unique collective identity because they were caught between the cultures they left behind in the old world and the new world which was foreign and had belonged to the Native. The old world symbolized what it meant to be civilized and proper but ironically, it was also those things that they found so constraining.