They f— you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to but they do
They will you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you…
Watching the new Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide, a tragically banal ride-along with transracial pretender turned viral controversialist Rachel Dolezal, I got Philip Larkin stuck in my head. Dolezal is not just a daughter lying about who her white parents were. She’s a mother whose lies cost her three black sons any chance at a normal life.
An hour and 40 minutes is a long time stuck with a woman whose delusions have been so well-documented. Dolezal’s been a fixture of the race debate since 2015, when a TV newsman in her native Spokane, where she formerly led the local NAACP chapter and taught African-American studies at Eastern Washington University, outed her. Filmmaker Laura Brownson started work on the film just a month later.
From then on, there didn’t seem much left to say. But with countless magazine profiles, talk show appearances, a bizarre memoir and book tour, she tried anyway to explain why she’d spent half her adult life pretending be black. How much could be left to examine? Reviewing the documentary for The New Yorker Doreen St. Felix dismissed Netflix’s tweeted defense of the Dolezal feature. “That Dolezal’s life constitutes a ‘microcosm for a larger conversation about race and identity’ is an overstatement,” she wrote. But it’s also a misstatement of what the documentary actually accomplishes in retracing one strange woman’s infamy to its roots.
“Are you African-American?” reporter Jeff Humphrey asked her, a 40-year-old woman with blue eyes, dark blonde hair in tight curls, and a lot of bronzer on. She said she didn’t understand the question. “Are your parents white?” he pressed. She turned and walked away. The video went viral overnight. Her parents are white, of course: They gave news interviews the very next day saying that, obviously, she is too.
But they’re not just white, we learn from Brownson’s portrait of Dolezal: Ruthanne and Lawrence Dolezal, Christian fundamentalists, kept their children cloistered on a Montana compound. Rachel and her adoptive siblings describe the pair as cruelly abusive, and Rachel says they tormented her and favored her allegedly brutish brother. The Dolezals took in multiple black children, cut them off from the culture of their birth and inadvertently triggered their biological daughter’s obsession.
None of which justifies her years of lying, falsifying records, and misrepresenting her race. Neither does it necessitate a documentary feature: It’s clear Dolezal, who spends much of the film struggling with her debts and job search, needs this more than the viewers at home do. She’s too self-serving—and too stubbornly transracial for an audience that only wants to see her finally give up the ruse—to be actually sympathetic.
And there’s no new arc, no self-discovery. If anything she doubles down on her delusion, insisting throughout on the reality of transracialism, and in a final scene slowly and deliberately weaving in black curls and marching into a Washington courthouse to change her white woman’s name to the Nigerian Nkechi Diallo.
In one oddly charming moment, a black friend answers Dolezal’s terminal self-pity, “Everyone already hates you, so you might as well go on being yourself.”
All that’s new here is also old as the kernel of the Larkin poem. Left little chance at happiness herself by a believably hellish upbringing (her adopted siblings corroborate her claims), she passes along arguably even slimmer chances for an uncomplicated life onto her own three children.
Franklin,13, is her biological son from her first marriage, to a Howard University classmate who she says insisted on getting married but refused to see her as black. He, her middle child, steals the show with his self-awareness and affectionate, if hopeless, teenaged exasperation. “Why don’t you just let it go away?” he asks her, knowing she won’t. Izaiah, her 17-year-old adopted brother turned adopted son, can’t wait to go away—to college, where she and her notoriety can’t follow.
It’s with this backdrop that we see Dolezal discuss her pregnancy during an awkward talk show appearance and ready her household for the baby, another child to be deprived of normalcy. It shows Rachel at her most relatable. The only story about her yet to be told—the one Brownson got that no one else did—is actually the most familiar arc of all time. She’s just another parental conduit for human suffering, and a timeless lesson in domestic dysfunction best served in the cynical meter of Larkin:
Man hands misery on to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself
