Rethinking Rachel Doležal and Transracial Theory

Using real-life examples, this book asks readers to reflect on how we—as an academic community—think and talk about race and racial identity in twenty-first-century America.  One of these examples, Rachel Doležal, provides a springboard for an examination of the state of our discourse around changeable racial identity and the potential for “transracialism.”  An analysis of how we are theorizing transracial identity (as opposed to an argument for/against it), this study detects some omissions and problems that are becoming evident as we establish transracial theory and suggests ways to further develop our thinking and avoid missteps.  Intended for academics and thinkers familiar with conversations about identity and/or race, Rethinking Rachel Doležal and Transracial Theory helps shape the theorization of “transracialism” in its formative stages.

In this unbridled and cogently, incisively argued meditation on transracialism through Rachel Doležal, Molly Littlewood McKibbin presents readers with the tools to begin to reimagine what is possible. Taking a deeply informed stance on the possibilities that arise when taking seriously the fissures in race and racial identity, McKibbin reckons majestically with how to approach a world in which race is of significant importance yet needs to be handled with care and complexity. And she comes correct, in the vernacular meaning of the phrase: as she thinks through this thorny issue, she shows her work, addresses key counterarguments, and does not mince words when it comes to advocating for a more complex assessment of race. This brief book is indispensable for the contemporary moment.

Marquis Bey, Assistant Professor, African American Studies and English, Northwestern University, USA

"Molly Littlewood McKibbin is a courageous thinker. She takes on a fraught topic—the possibility or not of transracial identity—about which advocates and opponents are screaming past each other, and deals with it carefully, calmly, methodically, to see what it might teach us. She wisely avoids the authenticity question, and focuses instead on the ways people are talking about the phenomenon, for and against. There is wise counsel here for those who would read and think, and a model for civil discourse."

Paul Spickard, Distinguished Professor of History, Black Studies, and Asian American Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

The author provides us with a stimulating and provocative analysis of socially defined racial boundaries. She provides answers to why they exist, why people find them so important, and how they are still defended in the 21st century. This is an important work that deserves attention.

Joseph L. Graves Jr, author of The Emperor’s New Clothes (2001); The Race Myth (2005); Racism, Not Race (2021, co-author)

The history of race is simultaneously a history of Black people’s subjugation and fetishization. In Rethinking Rachael Dolezal, Mckibbin moves between the history of race and racism, enactments and performances of raced-identity and various claims of authenticity and its opposite to provide an account of our racial present in which race as an idea and a practice meets blackness and Black people in what is at heart an account of Black people’s ongoing struggles to narrate themselves fully to others. Race remains a site for struggle and liberation as this book so clearly demonstrates.

Rinaldo Walcott, author of The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom

Molly Littlewood McKibbin, PhD, specializes in Black Literatures and Critical Race Theory.  She is the author of Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism and work published in African American Review, Callaloo, the Journal of Black Studies, and the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies.