This Rachel Dolezal situation is all sorts of fucked up (and hilarious imo). But since I heard about her, I canāt stop thinking about the history of white women trying toĀ āpassā for black in order to co-opt the struggles black people faced, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance. I donāt recall any of them going to quite the same lengths as Dolezal, though Lillian Wood, author ofĀ āLet My People Go,ā was believed to be a black woman for some time and justā¦never corrected anyone.Ā
During the Harlem Renaissance, there was a pretty active group of white women who basically moved to Harlem and basically forced themselves into black social spaces, calling themselves āvoluntary Negroesā. They made themselves āauthoritiesā on black issues, collected black art and commissioned work from Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston for photos and papers on āauthenticā black life, and in some cases, really did consider themselves to be black at heart: Nancy Cunard,Ā āI speak as if I were a Negro myself,ā and Charlotte Good Mason, āI am a better Negro than most of the Negroes I know.āĀ Ā (Mason would also make her patrons, including Hughes and Hurston, refer to her asĀ āGodmotherā.) This phenomena was discussed in Carla Kaplanās needlessly empathetic book Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Harlem Renaissance,Ā published in 2013,Ā that more or less paints them as forward-thinking revolutionariesā¦
These women fetishized the experiences of black men and women to the point that they convinced themselves they intimately knew what it meant to be blackāand even become black themselves. Ā Because most of these women were wealthy and privileged, they exerted power over these black artists who were often just trying to make ends meet. Without their financial contributions, a lot of the work we enjoy from these writers especially would likely have not seen publication.Ā
They used Harlem artists as textbooks and walked away with only the most basic, surface ideas of a āblack identityā that was built on stereotypes. Similar, as I suspect, to Dolezal, this kind of mimicry has less to do with a genuine desire to aid the struggle for civil rights, and more to with a desire to enjoy āexoticā black culture while co-opting blacksā oppression for their own purposes. I also feel that in many cases, this has to do with some white women/peoplesā issues of privilege and wanting to align themselves with oppressed minorities, so that they may claim that oppression for themselves and deny their own racial privilege.
There isnāt a ton of scholarship on the subject, unfortunately. (If anyone has addtāl links they want to add, please feel free.) Iām mostly going off of what I learned from an amazing professor I had, Autumn Womack, who taught us about the role white women had during the renaissance. Iāve linked to a video of her giving a lecture on the subject below; itās definitely worth the watch.Ā
Uptown Girls:Ā āMiss Anne in Harlemā by Carla Kaplan -NYTimes
Women Without Race: Miss Anne in Harlem - The Daily Beast
The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance
Langston HughesĀ āSlave on the Blockā from The Ways of White Folk
Artist Lecture Series - Autumn Womack [on White Patronage in the Harlem Renaissance]
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