Scalding Hot Takes: The Rachel Divide (2018)

Throughout The Rachel Divide, the diverting but deeply unedifying Netflix documentary about Rachel Dolezal’s post-scandal life I found myself thinking of those wonderful series of Peanuts comic strips where pint-sized sociopath and unlicensed therapist Lucy Van Pelt offers to hold a football so that hapless, innately doomed everyman Charlie Brown can kick it. 

Lucy is perpetually assuring Charlie Brown that she will not yank the football away at the last minute, leaving him to kick helplessly at the air before falling down in a frenzy of embarrassment and for some reason Charlie Brown believes her in spite of Lucy’s long, predictable history of fucking with him for no reason. 

Charlie Brown lives in hope that Lucy will finally stop behaving in a Lucy-like fashion and help him finally kick the god-forsaken ball. Because he allows himself to live in hope, he lives in perpetual disappointment as well. Lucy is never going to stop pulling away the football at the last minute because that’s who she is: a bossy, belligerent sadist who embodies the universe’s casual sadism and sees it as her sacred duty to ensure that Charlie Brown never know happiness. 

Rachel Dolezal is Charlie Brown in this scenario. She knows deep in her heart that the interview or public appearance she’s about to do will end disastrously, with her already-destroyed reputation further in tatters, yet she allows herself the awful luxury of hope all the same and consequently is perpetually being not just disappointed but shattered. 

The universe, particularly the part involving the press and the internet, is Lucy, forever telling Dolezal that things will be different this time, and while, yes, she’s only known rejection and mockery and cruelty from them before, this time she would finally have a kind, sympathetic forum to express her philosophical and political beliefs rather than the storm of sour judgment that greeted her before. 

Dolezal wants to believe that redemption is, if not immediately around the corner, then inevitable in time so she lines up to kick that football and every single time fate yanks it away at the last minute so it can enjoy yet another hearty laugh at her expense as she lies on the ground, dirty, confused and fooled and made a fool of all over again. 

To cite a particularly painful example, at one point Dolezal gushes about how excited she is to be invited to appear on The Real, a syndicated talk show hosted by black and hispanic women. With painful irony, Dolezal talks about how comfortable she’s going to feel in the presence of black women like herself who will get her and be sympathetic to her plight and her worldview. 

Dolezal lingers under the painful fiction that the African-American community’s forceful and consistent condemnation of her, her actions and her theories of race represent a massive misunderstanding, a family skirmish of sorts, and not a very deliberate, considered, seemingly permanent response to the ultimate act of racial cooption. 

It’s not that the African-American community didn’t understand Dolezal’s reasons for considering herself black and that’s why they condemned her rational and motivations. No, the African-American community understood damn well why Dolezal was presenting herself as a black Civil Rights activist when she was born to very white parents, and they rejected her even more forcefully as a result. 

That’s so hard for Dolezal to deal with that she’s largely refused to accept it. Dolezal understandably rejected her parents and her race. That was her way of dealing with unthinkable formative trauma. She still seems to be in deep denial over the African-American community’s rejection of her as well. 

The Rachel Divide follows Dolezal’s surreal life story in the aftermath of her outting as a woman born to white parents who nevertheless chose to publicly portray herself as black during her controversial and much-publicized leadership of the Spokane branch of the NAACP. The former academic’s personal and professional lives are in tatters. She’s more or less unemployable in academia. She’s a pariah in communities she devoted much of her adult life to and a walking punchline to the rest of the country, the crazy white lady who pretended to be black and was mocked and insulted on both sides of the racial divide for her misguided audacity. 

An ambitious woman who angrily demanded the media spotlight for political causes suddenly found herself instantly famous in ways that angrily challenged the idea that all press is good press. With Dolezal, the reverse is true: all press is terrible, terrible press. 

That’s true of The Rachel Divide. Dolezal seems to have seized upon it as an essential opportunity to clear the air and finally have an opportunity to tell her story, on her terms, in a sympathetic, empathetic way that will allow the public to see the suffering human being, artist, activist and scholar underneath the cruel media cartoon. 

Dolezal, god bless her, seems to think that the truth will redeem her, that it will set her free. Instead, it just serves to further condemn her.

The Rachel Dolezal of The Rachel Divide is just trying to hold it together. Her career as an academic is probably over for good. She’s doing hair in her home to make money and working on a memoir with a dude named Storms Reback that she hopes will accomplish the dual goal of bringing much-needed income into her household and redeeming her in the eyes of an angry public. 

As if all that weren’t stressful and anxiety-provoking enough, Dolezal finds herself a single mother deep into her thirties. 

Dolezal should incite our innate fondness for the underdog but there’s something calculating and disingenuous about her that renders her persistently, even perversely unsympathetic no matter how precarious her state.  It’s as if she’s invested so much of her life to perpetuating the fiction that she’s a strong black woman inconveniently born inside the body of a tiny blonde white lady that she has no authentic self, only an endless series of personas and rationalizations. 

If Dolezal emerges as deeply unsympathetic, it’s impossible not to feel for her attractive, intelligent and deeply insightful children and siblings, who end up having to deal with both being black in a violently racist country (needless to say, Spokane does not emerge as a racial utopia) and with having to be forever associated publicly with the life and legacy of Rachel Dolezal. 

Dolezal is clearly a deeply maternal figure but she has willfully blinded herself to the fact that her need to proclaim her innate and authentic blackness from the mountains is making the lives of the black family members she adores and cares for infinitely harder and more painful than they would be if they were untouched by Dolezal’s toxic legacy. 

Poor kid. I do not envy his lot in life. 

I honestly would much rather watch a feature-length documentary about Dolezal’s relatives than one about Rachel herself, if only because they speak much more poignantly and insightfully about the complexities, joy and pain of race than Rachel herself.

The film continually shifts the focus away from the cipher-like Dolezal, who can’t see beyond her own pain and enormous, brittle ego, to African-American female critics of Dolezal who lay into the controversial proponent of “Transracialism” and her worldview with an endless series of adroit, thoughtfully phrased criticisms.

For an academic, Dolezal doesn’t have much of a response to criticisms, both within and without the black community, beyond a defensive “Well, race is a construct anyway and I’ve always felt black so who are you to tell me that I’m not black?” 

You would imagine that Dolezal would have thicker skin by now, that she’d begin every interview and promotional appearance prepared to face and refute vitriolic and often very personal criticism. You would be wrong. With every interview, hope springs anew for Dolezal only to almost immediately die a quick, painful death when these conversations quickly devolve into a series of angry accusations of deceit, fraud, racism and delusion. 

It’s heartbreaking watching the deer-in-headlights expression on Dolezal’s face over and over again in The Rachel Divide as yet another media appearance goes predictably awry almost instantly and the sympathetic ear she’d been promised turned out to belong to an outspoken critic. 

The Rachel Divide is cursed with a distinct lack of intimacy. Dolezal’s story should burn brightly as a racially charged melodrama overflowing with white-hot emotions. Instead the film views Dolezal from a distinct distance. There’s something oddly icy and detached about the whole endeavor, like we’re watching Dolezal do an elaborate performance art piece about race and gender and class and alienation and belonging rather than live her life. 

That’s the sad irony of Dolezal’s story: living her profound personal truth entails living what looks to nearly everyone else like a lie, and not a harmless one either. I have now read Dolezal’s memoir for My World of Flops and watched a feature-length documentary about her and I still do not feel like I know her at all. 

She remains a cipher, a riddle, a question mark never to be answered. The Rachel Divide views its subject from a place of sociological detachment. Though Dolezal is hopeful it will help the world understand her it’s not really on her side. At all. It gives Dolezal’s critics and detractors time and space to communicate their ideas as vividly and compellingly as possible yet seems content to watch Dolezal’s helplessly and ineptly try to defend herself from what feels like universal criticism and condemnation. 

There’s a poignant emptiness at the heart of The Rachel Divide where Dolezal’s fierce, unabashed soul should be. The documentary depicts her as a lost and confused woman. She isn't quite black. She isn't quite white. Ultimately, despite the surreal nature of her story and the audacity of her ideas, Dolezal doesn't appear to be much of anything at all.  

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