A bevy of armchair psychologists (including yours truly) have attempted to explain Rachel Dolezal’s motivation for renouncing her white race to pass as a high yella black woman. Among the theories: She’s an average-looking white woman but a striking black woman, and she wanted to look sexier by whatever means available; she was gaming the System for affirmative action college and career freebies; she was an acute sufferer of a culture-wide manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome; she has a legitimate mental illness which, for obvious reasons, Narrative-subsumed psychologists are loath to classify or investigate; she loved the outpouring of sympathy and deference she got as a black woman; she was exacting a perverse vengeance on a white ex-boyfriend she never got over.
But, I think reader Laguna Beach Fogey gets closest to the prime impetus for Dolezal’s twisted Sybil self-erasement,
Observing her Christian missionary parents doting on their black babies and converting the noble savages in Africa, eventually young Rachel came to equate being black with being loved.
What a fucked up family. Could you imagine this poor girl, who in her girlish youth could have yodeled from atop a Swiss Alp, having to compete for her parents’ affection with a swarm of third world megafauna? I suppose the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but the tree can provide a lot of cover for the fallen apple to rot unmolested on the ground.