Allyson Hobbs, a Morristown High School alumna who teaches American history at Stanford, weighed in on Rachel Dolezal’s NAACP resignation in a New York Times opinion piece this week.
“As a historian who has spent the last 12 years studying ‘passing,’ I am disheartened that there is so little sympathy for Ms. Dolezal or understanding of her life circumstances,” wrote Hobbs, who got a standing ovation at last year’s Morristown Festival of Books after discussing her book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.
Dolezal stepped down this month as the NAACP chapter president in Spokane, WA., amid questions about her racial heritage. She says that she identifies herself as being black, although her parents say her ancestry is white.
Hobbs continues:
“The harsh criticism of her sounds frighteningly similar to the way African-Americans were treated when it was discovered that they had passed as white. They were vilified, accused of deception and condemned for trying to gain membership to a group to which they did not and could never belong.”
The historian goes on to express hope that Dolezal’s “puzzling” story can spur a “candid, lively, long-delayed, public conversation about the knotty meanings of race and racial identity.”
You can read the full commentary here.
