Held to answer

Take a long look at Rachel Dolezal, and don’t be surprised if you see Margaret Seltzer in blackface.

Both of them needed the black experience to give their lives meaning. In today’s America, being white is so … boring. Especially basic white – no gayness, no bisexuality, no gender grievances, no family dysfunction, no historic wrongs or epic sufferings.

Nothing for life’s show-and-tell.

The media were happy to oblige Dolezal and Seltzer. Each in her own way lived up to the face the media have put on race issues.

Dolezal’s alleged black parentage was bogus, but with a former black husband, two black children, a degree from a historic black college, a college teaching job in African studies, changes in the color and styling of her hair and light-brown tanning, this 37-year-old white woman passed herself off as black with such success that she was elected president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. Plus, in what is becoming a position reserved for blacks, she was chairwoman of Spokane’s police oversight commission.

She was selected for the commission after she concocted a story about being the daughter of a black Oakland police officer who had to flee the “Deep South” when he had a confrontation with “an abusive white police officer.”

Dolezal further enhanced her minority status by claiming to be the victim of hate mail and suspicious nooses left at her home.

“Her standing as a community leader was such that in 2010, when the New York Times sent a reporter to the area to write about the Tea Party, he made sure to get a comment from Dolezal,” the Northwest Inlander recalled this week.

From that Times’ story of several years ago: “Ms. Dolezal, who is multiracial, said she could not imagine showing her face at a Tea Party event. To her, what stands out are the all-white crowds, the crude depictions of Mr. Obama as an African witch doctor and the signs labeling him a terrorist. ‘It would make me nervous to be there unless I went with a big group,’ she said.”

Margaret Seltzer’s adventures in race didn’t capture nearly the publicity that Dolezal’s has, but there are similarities. Both women live in the Pacific Northwest, where the media take a magnifying glass to any allegations of racism (perhaps to make amends for their own predominantly white skin).

In 2008, Seltzer, 33, and living in Eugene, Ore., wrote a memoir called “Love and Consequences” about growing up as a white foster child in a black gangland family in Los Angeles.

New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani called it a “humane and deeply affecting memoir. … Although some of the scenes she has recreated from her youth (which are told in colorful, streetwise argot) can feel self-consciously novelistic at times, Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood.”

Particularly, as it turned out, she never lived in such a neighborhood.

Neverthless, until the deception was uncovered, the media ate it up:

“(A)n “intimate, visceral portrait of the gangland drug trade of Los Angeles as seen through the life of one household: a stern but loving black grandmother working two jobs; her two grandsons who quit school and became Bloods at ages 12 and 13; her two granddaughters, both born addicted to crack cocaine; and the author, a mixed-race white and Native American foster child who at age 8 came to live with them in their mostly black community. She ended up following her foster brothers into the gang, and it was only when a high school teacher urged her to apply to college that Ms. Jones even began to consider her future.”

Would it surprise you that the mammy-type character was called “Big Mom?” That raised no red flags with anyone.

“Besides being a consummate storyteller and analyst of inner city pathology, she is one of the few people who in the same conversation can talk about the joys of putting up her own jam … and the painful business of getting a tattoo of a large, weeping pit bull across her back the day the state of Nevada set a close friend’s execution date. ‘It’s the most ghetto thing on my body,’ she said.”

The rave reviews quickly turned to shock when, in a precursor to Dolezal’s situation, Seltzer’s real family blew the whistle.

It turned out that Seltzer grew up in Sherman Oaks, a wealthy L.A. suburb, which is 82 percent white. She attended high school at the exclusive Campbell Hall. She was never in foster care.

Like Dolezal, Seltzer was accused of “appropriating black culture,” which is nonsense and should not be regurgitated unquestioningly by the media. While certain cultures are associated with particular characteristics, human beings are infinitely varied. If Joss Stone sounds black, does Kathleen Battle sound white? If so, what difference does it make?

How could the media not love Dolezal and Seltzer in their pretend roles? They each exposed racism as they saw it. Is there anything the American media love more in the 21st Century than exposing racism? Not just any racism, but white racism – the only racism that counts, especially when you’re a white journalist eager to prove that you are NOT a racist.

When I worked at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, we had a minor flare-up one summer in our coverage of an annual event called “Unity in the Community,” a celebration of the city’s multiculturalism. Previously, it had been held in one of Spokane’s smaller outdoor venues – Liberty Park. When it moved to the larger Riverfront Park, the then-president of the NAACP had complained that the larger crowds would dilute one particular strain of diversity. (Care to guess which one?)

Like most American cities, Spokane has residents descended from many nationalities. We ran two photos of this event. One was of Swedish women, and the other was of a young black boy.

The day the photos ran our editor, who maintained a blog discussing issues behind the news coverage, publicly apologized to the NAACP and said the organization was right, that “Unity in the Community” had lost its focus in its move to the larger venue. How so? Because the black boy in our photo was a “Beaver Cleaver lookalike.”

According to this view, black only counted if it was very dark skin. Otherwise, we couldn’t show how we were reaching out to the black community.

It makes no difference that in 1981, when blacks comprised about 1.5 percent of Spokane’s population, the city elected a black mayor named James Chase.

Look how we have regressed in our obsession with race and the need to create an acceptable identity. How many variations on Dolezal and Seltzer occur every day by people trying to make themselves more interesting and marketable? Especially if they’re basic white.

In his book, “Every Day is For The Thief,” novelist Teju Cole tells of a Nigerian writer who’s been living in New York for years and goes home to Lagos to visit family. While he is appalled by the savagery and depravity  he finds in his childhood place, he feels sorry for American writers who “hoe the same arid patch for stories.” Meanwhile, in Nigeria he finds “pungent details” all around him.

Of course, America really isn’t an arid patch. People of all skin colors are out there working the racial angle.

Dolezal and Seltzer managed to cook up some pungent details.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons