Rachel Dolezal, the white American woman and “social justice” complainer who was discovered a few years ago to have been passing herself off as black, has written a new memoir to explain herself, and Dalrymple reviews it in this month’s New Criterion. Though her life choices are of course unusual, Dalrymple says the assumptions that underlie them reflect the absurdity of much modern thought:
Oddly enough, but most significantly, she looks at the world through an entirely racialized lens, though at the same time claiming that she is deeply opposed to racism. Black for her (she capitalizes the word, but not the word white) is completely distinct from, or the polar opposite of, white. No theorist or proponent of apartheid could have thought in more binary terms than she; black people are for her the carriers of blackness and very little else. The oppression they suffered, and the insults they endure, are for her the justification of her own invincible self-righteousness (if there were a Nobel Prize for Self-Righteousness, I would nominate her). As a disadvantaged group, blacks are ex officio moral aristocrats; and in claiming a black identity, the author is thereby claiming moral superiority, at least in her own estimation.