I walked into the Tribeca Film Festival première of Netflix’s “The Rachel Divide,” a domestic portrait of our modern minstrel Rachel Dolezal, already feeling bored. That’s not how I like to approach a work of art. But what could the director, Laura Brownson, reveal about this person, and the grim credulousness of our culture, that we had not deduced the evening that KXLY’s street interview with the ambushed Dolezal went viral? I happened to be on Twitter that night, in June of 2015, and was heartily amused by the too-dark foundation and the kinky wig that the nervous Dolezal wore as she, then the president of Spokane’s N.A.A.C.P. chapter, dodged the inquiries of the reporter Jeff Humphrey: “Your parents, are they white?” Weeks of poring over the details followed: how Dolezal, a white woman who grew up in Montana, weaseled her way into Howard University, where she submitted a painting thesis based on the interior of the black man’s mind; her work as an educator, teaching black students “The Black Woman’s Struggle”; a slew of falsified documents. But what I assumed would have evaporated into the ether of memedom extended into part of a years-long “national conversation about race.” Nonsense terms like “transracialism” and “cisracialism” had to be entertained by the likes of both Savannah Guthrie and Melissa Harris Perry. Dolezal’s charade produced a secondary one: we were to accept that the chaos she caused had crystallized into a dialogue that carried weight and meaning. And yet, when she is cited in sober talk about identity and “feeling black” versus “feeling white,” it always feels like we are in a knockoff Adrienne Kennedy piece of absurdist theatre.
Anyone who has read Ijeoma Oluo’s 2016 interview with Dolezal, in which the simple presence of Oluo, an actual black woman, appears to make Dolezal seethe, might agree that this book had been closed, and I did leave the screening of “The Rachel Divide” thinking that the film, while seductive, may have been a superfluous post-mortem. It is a tough thing, creating the momentum of revelation from a quintessentially overexposed social-media story. In its structure, the film labors to give Dolezal’s interviews, her book—“In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World,” which was published last year and sold abysmally—and her Instagram and Twitter comments new context, but the fact is that we’ve already endured them. To say, as Netflix tweeted, defensively, last month, that Dolezal’s life constitutes a “microcosm for a larger conversation about race and identity” is an overstatement. When the film gets too large for its britches, trying to make Dolezal the harlequin figure of America’s racial confusion, “The Rachel Divide” overestimates the potency of Dolezal’s fraudulence.
And it is an old fabulism. After watching the documentary, I read “Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of a Black Renaissance,” Carla Kaplan’s history about the white women who, at the turn of the century, longed to “go Negro.” (That book opens with “White Woman’s Prayer,” a poem that was published in The Crisis, in 1930, in which Edna Margaret Johnson wrote, “I write in self-contempt, O God . . . Tonight on bended knees I pray: / Free me from my despised flesh / And make me yellow.”) Miss Annes have always sought psychosexual negrophile thrills. More important, they have wanted to augment their cultural power, to emphasize their female suffering.
“The Rachel Divide” opens on a little white clapboard house in Spokane. “Who’s the gatekeeper for blackness?” Dolezal ponders in a voice-over. Her telltale blonde box braids frame her freckled and blue-eyed face. Dolezal tears apart bundles of synthetic braiding hair as she works on a client in her living room, a makeshift black-hair salon. Hair is the way she makes money now, having lost her positions at the N.A.A.C.P., at Eastern Washington University, where she was an instructor in Africana studies, and as the chair of the city’s Police Ombudsman Commission. Her home is messy, strewn with books and documents and the detritus of the two black men who live with her: Izaiah Dolezal, once her adopted sibling, now her adopted son, and Franklin Moore, her biological son, whom she had with her ex-husband, Kevin Moore. Brownson’s shots often linger on this garrison of delusion, the place where Dolezal’s theories about “racial fluidity,” as she calls it, run wild. There, Dolezal fancies herself a Dorian Gray figure, slowly painting a portrait of herself, brown-skinned and adorned in vague Afrocentric regalia, which she will, by film’s end, destroy. One of the first times we see Dolezal drive around her town, she takes her sons to the local barbershop. She parks in front, waiting. Then the gruff and disembodied voice of the owner is heard, demanding that she move her car from his establishment.
Brownson might have sappily dwelled on Dolezal’s pariah status. There is a version of this documentary that flattens its subject into an eccentric figure of pity. But the film does its due diligence, and, in a blitz of summary, methodically reminds us of the damage that Dolezal has wrought. It is the cumulative biography of a lie. In a predominantly white town in Washington, she slowly starts convincing people that she is a black woman. She becomes something of a local civil-rights figure, leading call-and-responses at Black Lives Matter rallies. Rejecting the whiteness of her own family, she understands blackness as an eternal martyrdom, and that is why she, a victim in other ways, has appropriated it. She makes frequent calls to the police, telling them that white supremacists are targeting her for her activism. They grow suspicious, finding that some of her accusations seem fabricated. Humphrey confronts Dolezal, her life falls apart, and her lies leave the country rapt.
I grew irritated by the film’s montages of pundits saying that their identity was represented by pain, and that this was the reason that Dolezal could not be black, which seemed obliquely to promote the maudlin state of the colloquial definition of blackness. In late 2015, Brownson followed Dolezal, who was pregnant at the time, as she appeared on “The Real,” a talk show hosted by fashionable women of color. On the show, Dolezal says, “I acknowledge I was biologically born white, to white parents, but I identify as black.” The comedian Loni Love turns to her, somewhere between enraged and bemused. “I’m black. I can’t be you. I can’t reverse myself.” More effective is the footage we see of LaToya Brackett and Kitara Johnson, former associates of Dolezal’s at the N.A.A.C.P., who make it plain how much Dolezal’s chicanery set back their efforts in Spokane.
Eventually, Brownson locates the real story: a primitive power game between mother and child, one that forecasts calamity. And it is in this mode that “The Rachel Divide” becomes a disturbing and enthralling drama of the American family, the pain of its truths and its fictions. “I almost killed her,” Dolezal says, of her mother’s difficult labor. Her parents, Ruthanne and Lawrence, Montanan members of a fundamentalist Christian sect, went on morning talk shows in 2015 and 2016, stating that their daughter was a pathological liar. The documentary posits that Dolezal is one, but that she is also a victim, and leaves it up to the viewer to manage these contradictions. Dolezal reiterates that she had been physically and mentally abused, by her parents, and sexually abused, by her biological brother, Joshua. (The parents have denied these claims.) She is an unreliable narrator. But interviews with Izaiah and Esther, who is Dolezal’s other adopted black sibling, corroborate that Dolezal’s mother and father subjected their children to horrifying treatment. Esther shows us keloids caused by “baboon whips.” She says that she was also abused by Joshua, against whom she’d attempted to bring a case, with her sister as a witness. (The case was later dropped.)
Dolezal’s attempt to hide her whiteness involved giving herself a black family— Izaiah, Esther, her thirteen-year-old son, Franklin, and the new baby, Langston—and, even after her lies were exposed, a West African name, Nkechi Amare Diallo. A scene showing Dolezal in blackface breast-feeding Langston is a grotesque inversion of images of the black wet nurse, and a harbinger of how his life may go. (Footage of a Black Lives Matter rally, taken before the fallout, in which Dolezal has made Izaiah and Franklin lie in chalk outlines, turns the stomach.) In 2016, Izaiah visits Howard University, eager to attend the historically black college. Dolezal says that she is happy that he will be able to get away from her, seemingly aware of how her infamy wears on him. But then she posts a photo of Izaiah on the university campus to her social-media accounts, also aware that it will attract attention in the form of heckling, and “The Rachel Divide” comes into focus as an intimate depiction of the perversions of the mother. Dolezal suffers; she makes her sons suffer, too. We had known how Dolezal affected the organizations in Spokane but not so much how she affected her sons. Brownson does well to give Franklin his own platform—his melancholy, especially, haunted me for days. Sensitive and brilliant, he loves his mother, and wants to defend her from the consequences of the fantasy she created. But he is also aware of her potential for destruction. At one point, we see Dolezal post a picture on Instagram of a banana on the hood of her car as evidence that she experiences the ancient American torment. (In “In Full Color,” Dolezal imagines herself a slave.) He wonders if the banana, and all the other racial intimidations she claims to have suffered, were in fact planted by her. “Why don’t you just let it go away?” he asks her at one point, exasperated by his mother’s pursuit of notoriety. The very fact that the exchange is being filmed gives him his answer.
