The race you are or want to be

A local president of the NAACP has resigned because, it turns out, she isn't African-American. Not that being African-American is a requirement for the office, but it just came across as unseemly that someone would fake their own race, perhaps to gain the office she held.

For decades, a few Americans with African-descended ancestors, were able to "pass" into white society because of their fair skins and other European features. This feat repudiated the legal claim in some Southern states that any African ancestry made a person "colored" and excluded them from white society with its privileges and opportunities.

Rachel Dolezal went the other way and gained status as a leader of the NAACP. She has resigned her position but has not explained or apologized for her misleading racial switch. A news network commentator referred to her feat as "transracial," a play on the popular "transgender" moniker for people who claim to have been assigned the "wrong" gender at birth. Some researchers have supported this type of claim, insisting that gender should not be based on genitalia but on self-identity and feelings.

If Bruce Jenner, a former male Olympic champion, can become a woman, why can't Dolezal, a former blond and fair-skinned woman, become African-American, based on her self-determined racial identity? And if racial identity is transient, what's the point of asking race questions on census forms and having race-based scholarships and electoral redistricting?

The NAACP, to its credit, proclaims that there is no racial qualification for leadership in the NAACP, and throughout its history the NAACP has had leaders who were Caucasians. The uproar over Dolezal's faking her blackness, however, shows that Americans are still sensitive about race.

This 'drop of water' is really a great flood

An article in The Wilson Daily Times last week provides a sobering message to those who hoped the inauguration of Barack Obama might bring about a new era. "Today we saw a drop of water," the Rev. Alonzo Braggs, the local NAACP president, told a reporter. "... we need an ocean of change."

If the election of America's first African-American president just 44 years after legal segregation was outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and just 40 years after the 1968 Voting Rights Act began enforcing the guarantees of the 15th Amendment is a drop of water, it's a large enough drop to float Noah's ark. It's a big enough drop to flood the National Mall with upwards of 2 million joyous celebrants at Obama's inauguration.

In my lifetime, I have seen the removal of "white only" signs, the registration of millions of black voters who previously were not allowed to vote, the integration of schools and businesses and the election of thousands of black politicians to positions of great power. These are not drops of water that have dampened the social fabric, they are floods that have washed away the stain of segregation and prejudice. Obama's astounding and improbable election is a validation of all the changes that have transformed society over the past 50 years.

Early in Obama's presidential campaign, I suggested that he would be old-line racial activists' worst nightmare. Self-appointed African-American spokesmen, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, would find themselves without portfolio, replaced by a leader legitimized by the electoral process and bearing the authenticity of nationwide public support. Braggs' suggestion that Obama's inauguration doesn't amount to much is either delusional or disingenuous. He points to the problems remaining in this country — illiteracy, crime, economic insecurity — as if any one person or one action could correct these problems. President Obama will not be able to wipe out illiteracy or poverty in one day or in eight years, but his election makes clear that these shackles can be overcome, that the trail has been blazed for individuals to overcome the handicaps that society places before them. And that amounts to far more than a drop in the bucket.