This is a bad piece of journalism. It's a great op-ed, but to call this a "feature" or a "profile," would be a lie. It's clear that the journalist went into this interview with biases. I do not blame her for having biases, as obviously Rachel Dolezal is extremely problematic. But Oluo did not go into the interview intending to tell a story, she went in to preach to the readers. This is not the job of a journalist. The job of a journalist is to step back and tell the story of the subject, not force yourself into the narrative of someone else. This piece reads like a Refinery29 post ("I tried interviewing Rachel Dolezal so you won't have to! Watch me here!") In this profile of Dolezal, readers learned more about Ijeoma Oluo than we did about Dolezal.
Other times, Oluo simply failed to ask the pertinent questions, instead, writing things that she observed, accompanied by scathing assumptions. For example, she has the line: "Other than the paintings of her children, most of the Black people depicted appear to be dressed as slaves or tribespeople." Why didn't Oluo ask Dolezal to address this? It's a missed opportunity to ask an original question for once, instead of falling back on the "don't you know you're privileged?" question that every journalist asks her. She didn't ask Dolezal about the paintings, and yet used them in the article as ammunition for a criticism of her.
A journalist's job is to tell a story, not to pontificate. A skillful journalist knows how to craft the pontifications into the story through the art of narrative- to reveal Dolezal's very real and problematic nature with just the use of Dolezal herself: her quotes, her actions, and details of her life and her book. The woman is so problematic it would have been easy to do, without having to include the journalist herself, the journalist's opinions and the journalist's lecture. But Oluo doesn't seem to be skillful enough to write a piece like that, which is why this "profile" of Dolezal reads like an angry Facebook post instead of a news piece.

Fuckin fragile whites. The author did her best to approach the subject neutrally. Despite her best efforts, Dolezal comes off as yet another white person trying in vain to understand the plight of the black American. She has never been pulled over for a broken tail light and put in jail. Despite her braidsshe is never feared for her life for one second in her pathetic white existence. The author is 100% Justified in questioning her subjects white privilege.

Leave this woman alone to live her life, celebrate blackness and define herself as she pleases. She is an individual and the way she identifies is her personal choice and an expression of her soul. She is no different than a person born a gender they do not match internally. How rude and disrespectful to address her as her old name. This writer is super condescending and judgmental. Ugh. Such narrow minded, victim identified thinking.

Excellent interview, carefully thought out, professional, well written and incredibly patient, given the flat out, unfortunately media-fortified gall of Dolezal. This (Oluo's interview) is how the press should have approached this empty cultural cherry picker from the get go, if at all. Instead, respected news agencies lent credence to Dolezal and to her argument that you can pick and choose not only another's cultural identity but their pain, their heritage. Bits of it, anyway; the good bits, the palatable bits... Whites (I'm one) have to look really hard at this insatiable drive to blithely poach and collect cultures to fill the yawning emptiness inside. It's insulting, intrusive, grabby, presumptuous, selfish, heedless, greedy and destructive. Deadly.

Incredibly insightful interview. Thanks Mercury, Stranger and Oluo.

I kind of equal her to that woman that poisoned her child and blogged about the horrors of it to get attention. She's mentally ill. She's intelligent and fully functioning, but I think the problem with reading into everything she says and does is that you're taking her opinions a true social stance and not from someone with emotional and psychological issues. You wouldn't ask the woman that poisoned her kid about her opinion on raising a kid with a rare disease so why ask this woman about her thoughts on race?

I have the same question about transgender as snickerdoodle. It seems to me that people who are really 'a woman stuck in a man's body' should be insulted by the people who claim to be 'fluid' that will just go back to being a man when the trend ends or they decide they don't want to be socially ostracized - like this author appears to be insulted by Dolezal playing both races when she can just become white any time she wants.

One more thing - as a white person I would agree with Dolezal that white people probably do see her as black or bi-racial, particularly with her 'black' hair style, the tanning that she obviously does, and attaching a presumably adopted black son to herself.

@6 ~ I dig that you bring this up. I wish that the Mercury was more open & willing to actually discuss this ~ our fears & confusions & our feelings of appropriation. Instead, we are told that we can't even have a little column that is about women. Why?
Anyways, if you want some answers to your questions, go check out this article on The Stranger. The comment section there has a pretty deep discussion about exactly this.
Good stuff.

It's been 4 months since this article came out and I only discovered it now because I am researching all the funding of the transgenderizing of children. I remembered Dolezal's narcissistic revisionism of trying to convince everyone that simply because she 'feels black- she therefore IS black', and FEELINGS are all that matters when it comes to gaining license to appropriate ethnicity, race or biological & cultural identity.
The language that Oluo uses to describe what's going on here IS the same as the trans agenda - THAT's why several commenters have brought it up. The questions ARE the same and Oluo did this piece brilliantly and appropriately given what she was dealt.
So WHY are those comments that bring up questioning trans posted in grey with no identities attached? #FollowTheMoney