That’s mighty white of her.

Now that her “transracial” identity has been exposed, and she has lost her career and professional reputation, her name and face will unambiguously identify her to the world. She’s going to have an opportunity to really find out what it means to be black.

You can’t blame someone as “passing” as someone they’re not if they do so to escape discrimination and prejudice. But this isn’t exactly the same, is it? Neither is it a sin to admire and identify with another culture, and to adopt its norms and ethos. People like Eminem and Tiger Woods have excelled in public arenas in cross-cultural pursuits, and been accepted and praised by the arbiters of taste in those fields. Whole generations of Caucasian American and British musicians have adopted the aesthetic and artistic conventions of the American Negro by honoring Jazz and Mississippi Delta Blues. But they have all done so without disguising who they are and lying about their heritage and history.

It can even be argued there is no traditional African-American culture. The slaves were ripped from their separate tribes in Africa and thrown together in a confused heterogeneous mix of multiple peoples and nations. They were then systematically robbed of everything that was theirs, their language, religion, beliefs, communities, families–their entire culture–and forced to adopt a bastardized and corrupt version of the customs of the civilization that brutalized them, and through slavery and segregation, were prevented from fully integrating into the naturally evolving European societies of the New World. It could be called a form of bloodless genocide, except there was a lot of blood involved, too.

The former slaves have been struggling ever since to construct new cultures, since their own were forgotten and those of the slaveholders rejected them. This has occurred everywhere in the New World, but it has been particularly the case in Anglo-Saxon North America. “Black culture” in every nation in the Americas (but especially in the United States) has never really had a chance, and certainly not the time, to evolve naturally with the legitimacy and authenticity of a true history. It is a confused mix of hastily adopted European elements and of deliberately manufactured attempts to recapture an idealized version of a romanticized Africa that never really existed.

Rachel Donezal is a white American girl, She does not come from a racist background (her parents adopted black children) but she comes from a culture that has never fully understood what culture is, because America has always been relatively geographically separate from other nations, and it has deliberately marginalized and isolated its aboriginal, captured and immigrant populations. America has always substituted “race” for “culture” because it never really understood the difference.

Whatever empathy for black people Ms Dolezal may have had, although certainly commendable, has been perverted into a vulgar farce, an obscene charade which insults not only her own culture, but the true struggle and cruel history of the people she has chosen to masquerade. She does not do what she does to avoid prejudice or oppression, but to exploit it for her own professional advancement. She might not be racist, but she is certainly a careerist, what might be maliciously ascribed to as a very “white” thing. Although there have been many Caucasian NAACP leaders, advocates and allies, Donezal’s adopted blackness certainly gives her resume an advantage over theirs.

Unlike most of my fellow Americans, I am bicultural, I understand perfectly well what its like to have two heads on your body, and to be able to adopt one or the other, for both survival or convenience. I know because I was born and raised that way. It’s not something you choose to do, or want to do, its something you can’t help doing, but that you’re instantly aware of when you do.

I know exactly where this woman is coming from.