Rachel Dolezal's "natural hair" politics

In this summer of raw identity politics, it is ironically appropriate that everyone's favorite fake black woman, Rachel Dolezal, is back in the news.

Dolezal, you surely recall, was the local NAACP president in Spokane who was exposed last year by a local television station and by her estranged parents as a white woman who was only passing for black.

Or, as she might put it, she has been identifying as black since 2006 in much the same was that Caitlyn Jenner identifies as a woman, despite having the same male body that she had when she was Olympic medalist Bruce Jenner.

Dolezal was back in the news with the announcement that she would be headlining a Labor Day weekend rally in Dallas called the Naturally Isis Braid-On, Economic Liberty March and Rally.

No, Naturally Isis has nothing to do with the Islamic State. The event is organized by celebrity natural hair stylist and activist Isis Brantley and, yes, hair activism is a thing.

Brantley crusaded since the mid-1990s -- which included an arrest and various legal battles -- to win passage last year of a state law to exempt Texas' hair braiders from the expensive requirement to obtain a cosmetology license. Some other states have adopted similar legislation. In the natural hair movement, the follicle is political.

But Brantley's hero status took a beating when she posted the news on her Facebook pages that one of her special guests would be Dolezal.

How, the critics asked Brantley, could a champion of an African cultural art form honor a white woman who is nationally accused of appropriating black culture?

"Don't think of her as someone who has contributed to the years of work we have done to protect this cultural art form," Pamela Ferrell, the co-founder of the American Hairbraiders and Natural Haircare Association, told The Daily Beast. "I see it as an opportunity for a white woman to steal this African cultural art form, become an expert and then get opportunities that we have been denied. I've seen it happen over and over again."

Yes, in an ideal world, we African-Americans might well be flattered to be imitated so often by people from other races and cultures, particularly in music and other performing arts. Cultural appropriation is an inseparable part of this nation's creative and innovative dynamism.

But too often, as Farrell says, it has not been done with respect or proper royalties and recognition. People who feel that they have been robbed historically will cling all the more fiercely to whatever they have left -- including the art of hair braiding.

But in an interview with writer Linda Jones for the Beast, Dolezal insisted she was "not coming as a curiosity or for any controversy." She resigned from the NAACP after her outing and lost her job as an adjunct college instructor. Since then Dolezal, who once taught a course in the politics of black hair, has made her living as a hair braider.

Still, people have good reason to question her years of leading people to believe she was black. There also was that troubling episode in which she was suspected of sending a package of racial threats to her own mailbox at the NAACP. Only some postal workers, who have since been cleared, and Dolezal had keys to the box. Hmmm....

But as we have learned repeatedly in the summer of Trump, much can be forgiven and forgotten in the glare of celebrity, and Dolezal's misadventures made her a genuine headliner. She's almost finished with a memoir, she told the Beast.

That means we probably will be seeing more of her, although there's no word yet as to whether she will take what seems to be the last refuge of celebrities these days, running for president.

What intrigues me is how Dolezal's rise to prominence marks a milestone of sorts in America's racial history. There have been rare cases of whites passing for black in this country. But there have been far more examples of black people who went the other way, sometimes leaving their families and communities forever, in order to reinvent themselves into a world of white privilege.

That's why conservatives love Dolezal even as they ridicule her. She seems to confirm their argument that there's not much privilege left in being white. Indeed, she may show racial inequality to be less severe than it used to be. But I still don't see many other white folks rushing to follow her lead. It wouldn't be natural.

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)