Cobb | The new hashtag #PassingForBlack is thus ironically manifest by those calling foul. An honest Black man, and let us use the James Baldwin standard, would be not only accepting but embracing of Rachel Dolezal. For in 1963 he said of white people:
The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality.
It is hard for me to imagine that Rachel Dolezal is the sort of
person who fears the loss of her white identity or labors under an
understanding of history that gives her innumerable reasons to believe
that black men are inferior to white men. She doesn't impress me as one
with any fear of acting upon what she knows, and she certainly
understands that she is in danger.
Nevertheless some media Negroes and their accomplices and masters
have decided that a few genes must inevitably seal one's fate, and they
call this the attitude of a proper Black man. What kind of man assigns
his fate to his genes in a nation dedicated to Liberty?
