In the summer of 2015, the president of the Spokane Washington NAACP chapter, Rachel Dolezal, was “outed” as white during an interview with a local news station; publicly and privately, she identified herself as a Black woman. Though ostensibly a local interest story about a disgraced community figure, the story quickly caught national then international media interest, spreading further and faster through discussion of it on social media. Much of this discourse began attaching an unfamiliar term to Dolezal: “transracial”. This term is used to indicate that, though Rachel Dolezal acknowledges she was born to Caucasian parents, she claims her identification with Blackness is genuine; Dolezal believes she is Black, that Blackness is “a state of mind” she inhabits. In the days and weeks that followed, journalists from major publications in the UK and the USA wrote articles adding details to the story and opinion pieces offering their judgements on Dolezal’s racial escapades; as time went on, academics began publishing papers and then books discussing Dolezal, transracialism, and the socio-cultural construction of racial identities. Much of this work sets out to argue that Rachel Dolezal either is or is not Black and, in this way, this discourse about “transracialism” has become a debate about our popular and scholarly definitions of Blackness.
This is the point my project, Ambiguities in Black, takes up: what does this discourse that emerged in the wake of the Rachel Dolezal transracialism scandal do to ways of talking and thinking about Blackness? Because I suggest Rachel Dolezal – or the social figure she has come to represent – has implications that reach beyond herself; she (or it) re-emerges in stories of others accused of similar racial transgressions, be it the changeable racial character of American academic Jessica Krug or European social media influencers accused of “blackfishing”. It has become difficult to have conversations about racial transgression that are not haunted by Dolezal’s figure, which is another way of saying Rachel Dolezal has become a cultural archetype of a certain kind of bad racial actor. And, as I argue in the project, the discussion of her case – by journalists, social media users, and academics – has become a public forum that mediates on “authentic Black identities”. This question of what Blackness is and how we might know whether someone is Black is long contested and of vital importance to critical race theorists and scholars of Blackness, as well as anti-racist political actors. By analysing the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse, my project produces answers as to the assumptions and logics about racialisation and Black identities circulating and structuring this popular media and academic discussion, and the ways in which the discourse can be seen to complicate, alleviate, or exaggerate rising tensions in our cultural, political, and theoretical dialogue on racial identity. Applying a Black feminist analytical lens, I ultimately argue the discourse produces a conceptualisation of Blackness that remains captive to hegemonic, anti-Black racial logics.
Research Area: RA3, Language, Culture, and Education
Black feminisms; theories and critiques of identity; trans feminism; Black anti-humanism; critical social theory; and feminist epistemologies and methodologies.
Publications:
Journal article: Higson-Sweeney, N., Mortlock, A., & Neville, F. (2022). A tale of two hats: Transforming from the researched to the researcher, The Open Review, 7.
Book chapter: Mortlock, A. (2024). “Studying whilst Black: Reflections on researching Blackness in white space. Book chapter: Black Scholarship Collective”, in Ackah, W. et al. (eds.), Strength, Courage and Wisdom: The Journey and Experiences of Black PhD Students in UK Academia, Bristol: Bristol University Press. pp 53–56.
Book review: Mortlock, A. (2022). Book review: Black Trans Feminism by M. Bey. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 29(4), 639-641.
Blog: “The killing of Elianne Andam – patriarchy as a theory of gender.” Engenderings LSE Blog, 29/09/2023.
Blog: “Why white women crying is still racist: The work of trauma narratives in self-stories of transracialism.” Engenderings LSE Blog, 9/12/2020.
Social Media Links: