Rachel Dolezal in 2017. As a nation, we may be moving toward more consciousness about Blackness , but for most Americans Black consciousness remains a mystery. We, the people, have wanted it that way: for most of our history, racism has urged us to substitute stereotypes, distortions and patronizing assumptions for any real understanding of who Black people are. These days, as white folks wrestle with how to learn on a large scale, we’ve come across a somewhat novel problem: Individual whites pretending to be Black — what I call “passe noir . ” They tend to be in career positions usually occupied by Black people — the few career positions they usually occupy — first and most notably Rachel Dolezal , the white woman in Spokane who in 2015 was found to be passing as the Black head of the local NAACP. This year there was Jessica Krug of George Washington University, a well-regarded professor of Black studies whose book, “Fugitive Modernities,” is considered to be in the canon of histories of the African diaspora. More recently, CV Vitolo-Haddad was barred from taking a tenure-track position at Fresno State because it was discovered they’d been, as they put […]

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