Image via Complex Original
Perhaps in the future, when historians look back at 2015 headlines about racist frat parties and blackface Halloween costumes, things will be different. Perhaps, then, we won't have to spend hours explaining why cultural appropriation is hurtful. Perhaps someday, we'll no longer have to dread workplace conversations about racism. But not this year.
This was, after all, the year of Rachel Dolezal, a locally prominent civil rights activist and Africana studies teacher who successfully convinced her entire community that she was a black woman—even though Dolezal was born to white parents. Then several months later, news surfaced that Yi-Fen Chou, a Chinese-American poet published in this year’s anthology of Best American Poetry, was actually a white man named Michael Derrick Hudson. As it turns out, he used the name “Chou” as a pseudonym and racial cover.
Both Dolezal and Hudson took cultural appropriation to a new level, slipping on non-white identities as if they were costumes. One privilege of whiteness is that it’s viewed as a blank canvas, whereas people of color can’t typically escape the stereotypes projected onto them.
Dolezal and Hudson aren't the first white people to try and pass as another race. In fact, there's a long history of white people trying to play a race card different from the one they were given at birth. Here are six:
1. Kent Johnson/Araki Yasusada
Before Michael Derrick Hudson/Yi-Fen Chou, there was another white man writing under an Asian-sounding name. In the early 1990s, the literary world was heavily courting Araki Yasusada, a little-known but well-respected Japanese poet. The only problem? Yasusada was actually Kent Johnson from Illinois.
While writing as Yasusada, who was said to have survived the Hiroshima bombing during World War II, Johnson got published in several prestigious journals such as the American Poetry Review. After Yasusada's true identity surfaced, however, the scandal caused widespread embarrassment for these publications.
2. Martha Griffith Browne
In the nonfiction bookBlack Like Me, white journalist John Howard Griffin describes how he faced discrimination after donning blackface for six weeks in 1959, while traveling through racially segregated states. It became a hit, and spawned the 1964 movie of the same name, starring James Whitmore. But more than 100 years earlier, a white woman named Martha Griffith Browne did the same thing.
The abolitionist, who was also a former slave owner, published a book in 1857 called Autobiography of a Female Slave in which she wrote in the voice of a slave named Ann. Browne wanted to use money earned from book sales to free her slaves, and help them start new lives, which she did a year later. Like many other white writers who published pseudo-slave narratives, Browne hoped Autobiography of a Female Slave would drum up sympathy for black slaves among white southerners, and generate support for the abolitionist movement.
3. Dave Wilson
Dave Wilson didn’t have to make much of an effort to pull off his ruse. A white Republican candidate running for a seat on the Houston Community College Board of Trustees, Wilson won the 2013 race by implying he was black. His strategy was a calculated one: This particular district of Houston has a heavily black population.
The Republican sent out campaign mailers that were covered with stock photos of black people, and claimed he was endorsed by someone named Ron Wilson—the name of his cousin. But Ron Wilson is also the name of a former Houston state representative who just so happens to be black.
4. Archibald Belaney/Grey Owl
Racial fraud is not only a phenomenon confined to the United States. Canada had its very own Rachel Dolezal back in the early 20th century. His name was Archibald Belaney, a white Englishman who later identified as “Grey Owl” (or Wa-sha-quon-asin).
Belaney was born to white parents, and raised by his two white aunts in England. But as a young child, he had an overactive imagination and a keen interest in Native Americans, so Belaney began fictionalizing his life and fabricated a lie that he was born to an Apache woman.
But Belaney didn’t begin living as a Native American until he moved to Canada, where he lived among aboriginal people, and learned the Ojibwe language and traditions. Belaney married and had relationships with several Native women, including an Iroquois woman named Gertrude Bernard, who inspired his career in conservation and writing.
In the 1930s, Belaney began publishing under the name Grey Owl, and began making public appearances wearing buckskins and his long hair in braids. Despite the fact that he was widely recognized in Canada as an environmentalist, no one questioned his origin story. It wasn’t until after Belaney died in 1938 that the public discovered the truth; his legal wife, an Ojibwa woman named Angele Egwuna, revealed that one of Canada's most famous Native Americans was actually a white Englishman.
5. Ioannis Veliotes/Johnny Otis
It was mystifyingto hear Rachel Dolezal insist that she “identifies” as black, as though being black is a feeling you have, like being hungry or sad.
But back in the 1950s, a whiteman named Ioannis Veliotes said the very same thing. Instead of being criticized, however, he was celebrated as a symbol of interracial harmony.
Better known as Johnny Otis, Veliotes is widely considered the “godfather of the rhythm and blues.” Born to Greek parents, Veliotes was raised in a vibrant black community in Oakland, California; he grew up attending black churches, and eventually got involved in the civil rights movement. “As a kid I decided that if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black,” he wrote in his book, Listen to the Lambs.
Unlike Dolezal, however, Veliotes never denied that he was born to white parents—the musician just didn’t think it was relevant.
“I am black environmentally, psychologically, culturally, emotionally, and intellectually,” he wrote. “There is one area where I differ from most Negroes: I am black by choice.”
6. Internet commenters
It’s a given that any internet article about race will eventually attract hateful comments—the most entertaining of which are written by white people clearly masquerading as black people. It’s called “digital blackface.” The idea is that a black identity lends credibility to arguments about race or racism; by co-opting it, then, white commenters aim to advance their racist agendas by committing racial fraud. The trouble is that these commenters often hide behind cartoonish stereotypes of black people, and their ignorance of black culture eventually gives them away.