When Rachel Dolezal was “outed” as white during a local news television interview in 2015, a new social category exploded into popular cultural and academic discourses: transracial. This story – the scandalous demise of an NAACP Chapter President who identifies as Black whilst having been born to and raised by Caucasian parents – captured the public and scholarly imagination and precipitated a flurry of media and academic engagement with questions of identity fluidity and Black authenticity. Indeed, much of this work sets out to argue that Rachel Dolezal either is or is not Black and whether it is possible to become Black. This talk based on Alanah’s wider research, Ambiguities in Black, thus argues that the discourse about “transracialism” has become a debate about our popular and scholarly definitions of Blackness and asks in response: what does this discourse that emerged in the wake of the Rachel Dolezal transracialism scandal do to ways of talking and thinking about Blackness?

This question of what Blackness is and how we might know whether someone is Black is long contested and of vital importance to critical race theorists and scholars of Blackness, as well as anti-racist political actors. By analysing the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse, this talk discusses the assumptions and logics about racialisation and Black identities circulating and structuring this popular media and academic discussion, and the ways in which the discourse can be seen to complicate, alleviate, or exaggerate rising tensions in our cultural, political, and theoretical dialogue on racial identity.