gingerautie:

fierceawakening:

On occasion, I read blogs from people who used to be evangelical Christians. I had a look at one of these blogs yesterday, and I noticed something very disturbing about Rachel Dolezal’s family that I don’t seem to see mentioned many places.

The blogs I was looking at claim that the Dolezal parents (you know, that we’re seeming to hail as heroes right now because they told everyone Rachel’s white and a crazy liar) were abusive disciplinarians. But not just that, that discipline in households like theirs would have been racialized as well:

Like me, Rachel was homeschooled and grew up in a religious family. Her parents used a conservative Christian curriculum provided by Christian Liberty Academy Satellite School, a curriculum that, rumor has it, came with an HSLDA membership and a copy of To Train Up a Child. The family were strong young earth creationists, and Rachel’s father worked for Creation Ministries International. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Rachel’s parents began adopting black babies, reportedly in an attempt to affirm their pro-life stance. It is not uncommon for evangelicals to adopt as a way of creating an in-home mission field.

For those who are familiar with this subculture, you probably know where this is going. The CLASS curriculum is recommended by white supremacists, and as Kathryn Joyce has documented, black children adopted into evangelical families are often treated in a highly racialized way, punished more harshly than their white siblings and taught to denigrate their own culture.

White evangelicals adopting black kids is apparently a thing – here’s a relevant bit from one of the articles linked there:

Indeed, just two years later the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Christian denomination save the Catholic Church, passed a resolution calling on its 16 million members to get involved, whether that meant taking in children themselves, donating to adoptive families, or supporting the hundreds of adoption ministries that were springing up around the country to raise money and spread the word. Neo-Pentecostal leader Lou Engle also called for mega-churches to take on the cause, which would give them “moral authority in this nation.”

The movement spawned numerous conferences and books built around the idea that adopting a needy child is a form of missionary work. “The ultimate purpose of human adoption by Christians,” author Dan Cruver wrote in his 2011 book, Reclaiming Adoption, “is not to give orphans parents, as important as that is. It is to place them in a Christian home that they might be positioned to receive the gospel.” At an adoption summit hosted by the Christian Alliance for Orphans at Southern California’s Saddleback Church, pastor Rick Warren told followers, “What God does to us spiritually, he expects us to do to orphans physically: be born again and adopted.”

I call attention to this not to excuse Rachel Dolezal. I neither believe in “transracial” white people nor condone her lies.

But I do think it’s a… troubling counterweight to the idea that she was just fascinated with blackness because white people feel this irresistible urge to appropriate things.

I can imagine that, if your parents beat you all your life, beat your black siblings worse, and behaved with this sense that they were saving your black siblings, who had done nothing wrong, by imposing white Christianity on them and threatening them with institutionalization if they failed to obey (see first link), you might see “white people = punishers = bad people” and “black people = oppressed and violated, but good people.” 

I don’t know the whole story, of course, but I think I could see that leading to a deeply pathological aversion to whiteness. Which would still, again, not be okay, but would be a very different thing from “oh, girls, I love your haaaaaaaaaaaair~~~” or something.

And, it’s very much worth noting that her parents have a huge stake in her reputation being destroyed because she’s supporting (I think) an abuse claim against them.
And that she’s been doing this for years and their choice to speak out about it only now is a bit suspicious.
And that she was apparently forced to beat her black sibling by her parents, and that her not being really fucked up after that would be kind of surprising.