Ali Michael, an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, refuses to have children because she doesn’t want to pass on her white privilege.
In a Huffington Post editorial, Michael defends Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black, and until recently, served as president of the Spokane, Washington NAACP.
“There was a time in my 20s when everything I learned about the history of racism made me hate myself, my Whiteness, my ancestors… and my descendants,” Michael wrote. “I remember deciding that I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically.”
In what she calls her “Rachel Dolezal phase,” Michael spent her junior year abroad, living in South Africa with a black family, shaving her head, reading only black authors and wishing that she wasn’t white.
Michael says this is a common phenomenon called the “immersion” stage, in which white people take more responsibility for racism and privilege, and sometimes try to immerse themselves in communities of color.
Michael teaches a course at the University of Pennsylvania that she designed, entitled, “Whiteness: Counseling and Educational Perspectives.”
She describes how white people often don’t self-identify racially and feel like they don’t really have a culture.
“Throughout the 20th century, countless immigrant groups abandoned the artifacts of cultures that racialize them as immigrants (language, religion, food, styles of speaking, gesticulations, family structures, traditions, etc.) in order to become White,” Michael writes. “And this was not just a matter of fitting in; it was about accessing rights that were reserved for White people: citizenship, land ownership, police protection, legal rights, etc.”
She says that by misrepresenting herself as black, Dolezal may have been searching for a culture to identify with, or a way to escape the “overwhelming oppressiveness of Whiteness.”
Dolezal recently resigned from the NAACP after she was accused of lying about her race. Dolezal has also served as an adjunct professor of African Studies at Eastern Washington University since 2010, however a university spokesman told Breitbart that Dolezal is not an employee at EWU, and he doesn’t know if her contract will be renewed next quarter.
