Rachel Dolezal: Stone tossing, Mental Illness and Transhumanism

The 2015 revelation that Rachel Dolezal, president of Spokane's NAACP chapter, had been presenting herself as Black while being born to white parents crystallized three of our era's most volatile social tensions. Her case became a perfect storm for mid‑2010s media outrage.

It intersected with our evolving understanding of mental health, the gendered mechanics of cancel culture, and the increasingly fluid boundaries of identity in an age of technological body modification.

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The Female Sacrifice Machine

American mass media operates through a well‑established ritual of discovering ordinary women and transforming them into vessels for our collective anxieties. Anna Nicole Smith, Monica Lewinsky, Amanda Knox, Stormy Daniels, Octomom, the ever‑changing “Karen” of the week in the late 2010s, Caroline Ellison, the police officer who allegedly slept with her entire squad, “Hawk Tuah,” the new HR representative at the Coldplay concert…take your pick. These women are ciphers. They allow society to externalize and debate complex moral questions by destroying their individual lives while the American public tosses stones and squeals “aw, shucks.”

The pattern is remarkably consistent: select a woman, preferably white and reasonably attractive, who has committed some perceived transgression, then subject her to a public trial by tabloid for two to three weeks.

Rachel Dolezal fit this template perfectly. She had committed what appeared to be a clear moral violation in the late 2010s: racial fraud. Yet her case was particularly insidious because it occurred during the most ruthless period of cancel culture, when the mere accusation of deception could erase years of legitimate activist work. The irony was stark: a woman who had dedicated herself to advancing civil rights was destroyed not for harming the Black community, but for allegedly “appropriating” Black identity while serving it.

More interestingly, this case revealed how strange our perceptions of mental illness had become and hinted at what I believe will be the core culture‑war issue of the twenty‑first century: naturalism versus transhumanism.

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Mental Illness in the Age of Overcorrection

Our contemporary relationship with mental health has created a peculiar paradox. Decades of destigmatization efforts have produced an overcorrection in which mental illness is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It is invoked to explain behavior we find sympathetic, yet denied to those whose actions we deem morally reprehensible.

We refuse to label Mass shooters as mentally ill because, under this new paradigm, such a label would somehow absolve them of murder. Others are also not mentally ill because that would imply their identity group or behavior pattern may be pathological, which society finds unacceptable.

We have created a binary in which mental illness either absolves all responsibility or cannot coexist with moral culpability.

I am not entirely sure of Dolezal’s mental status, nor can any of us claim to be. However, many accounts suggest that her childhood was marked by fundamentalist religious control and documented abuse by her father. Research consistently links profound early trauma to identity fragmentation.

Identity fragmentation within dissociative identity disorder is common, and it can sometimes present as confusion around race. Consider Donyale Luna, one of the world's first Black supermodels, who obscured her racial identity behind blue contacts and an ethereal persona, never admitting she was an African American from Detroit. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye famously features a young character who suffers identity fragmentation after a sexual assault. These examples are widely empathized with because society views Black womanhood as pitiable. Our shared understanding of identity fragmentation within the context of DID is that it can alter many elements of someone’s sense of self. Disordered eating(whether leading to extreme obesity or anorexia)is highly correlated with early life trauma. Some studies also link gender dysphoria with DID. Whether you believe this research or not, please consider all the ways complex trauma may fragment a person’s identity.

So, let us suppose Rachel Dolezal is indeed mentally ill. Was it acceptable for her to represent herself as Black while working on behalf of the NAACP? That would involve some form of fraud, which we generally deem undesirable. But what if she genuinely believed her racial identity was authentic?

Is her deception more morally egregious than Elizabeth Warren’s or Zohran Mamdani’s disputed claims about their ethnic backgrounds to advance within institutional systems?

Dolezal has continued to live as a Black woman, and it is evident from her lifestyle that she believes herself to be “transracial.” Does it matter whether this belief stems from mental illness or a personal aesthetic choice? What tangible harms does her lifestyle cause to society at large?

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Identity in the Age of Technological Transformation

This media episode emerged at a historical moment when aspects of identity once thought to be immutable were becoming increasingly fluid through medical and cosmetic interventions. Dolezal did not undergo surgery, yet the methods she used to obscure her race, curly hair perms, and tanning techniques enabled her to present as mixed-race with little scrutiny. Such options would not be widely available without recent technological innovations in beauty care.

Suppose the twentieth century was, as filmmaker Adam Curtis suggested, the “century of the self,” in which identity was shaped through consumption and lifestyle. In that case, the twenty‑first century confronts us with the possibility that fundamental biological markers might also be transformed through consumer choices.

The civil‑rights movement’s “born this way” argument, later adopted by gay‑rights activists and transgender advocates, relies on appeals to biological essentialism. Yet suppose we simultaneously accept that gender is socially constructed. In that case, a claim that science supports only partially makes the boundary between socially constructed gender and supposedly immutable race increasingly challenging to defend.

Dolezal's case forces us to confront uncomfortable questions. If identity can be shaped by environment, sustained commitment, and genuine cultural immersion, what distinguishes legitimate transformation from fraudulent appropriation? Her decade of work within Black institutions, her advocacy, and her lived experience of anti‑Black harassment; do these constitute an authentic racial experience, or does her biological ancestry render them permanently illegitimate?

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What made Dolezal's case so explosively controversial was not any single element, but their convergence. She represented the collision of anxieties about female authenticity, confusion about the relationship between mental health and moral responsibility, and uncertainty about the boundaries of identity in an era of unparalleled technological possibility.

Her destruction served multiple functions. It reinforced traditional racial boundaries at a moment when other identity categories were becoming fluid. It channeled our discomfort with identity transformation into the familiar ritual of female sacrifice. It allowed us to avoid confronting the psychological complexity of identity formation by framing her story as a simple case of fraud rather than a nuanced human phenomenon.

The Rachel Dolezal case was not ultimately about one woman's identity fraud. It was about our collective inability to hold complexity, our need for clear moral categories, and our persistent tendency to resolve anxiety by publicly destroying women who transgress social boundaries. In killing her, we shielded ourselves from grappling with unresolved questions:

• Where do legitimate identity boundaries exist?

• How do we balance individual psychological complexity with social responsibility?

• What happens when our frameworks for understanding selfhood prove inadequate to lived realities?

These questions did not disappear with Dolezal’s public exile; they have become even more pressing as technological capabilities expand and traditional identity categories continue to blur.