Rachel Dolezal: How should we respond to a white woman who passed as black?

Here’s the perfect fable for our “post-racial” times and no, it’s not the 2004 Wayans brothers comedy White Chicks – although, incredibly, there are some similarities. This week a 37-year-old woman called Rachel Dolezal was “outed” as white by her parents, both of whom describe themselves as Caucasian. For the past few years Dolezal has held a part-time teaching post in the African Studies department at Eastern Washington University and is the local leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Spokane, Washington. Yet, according to her mother, Ruthanne Dolezal, Rachel began to “disguise herself” as black some time around 2006 and, according to Spokane NAACP’s Facebook page, she introduced a black man to her colleagues as her (fake) father earlier this year.