Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I should say that I find all the attention on Dolezal deeply troubling, and her flimsy book brings nothing new or interesting to conversations on the complicated layers of American race. In fact, her self-serving position is deeply ahistorical (she seems to have no regard for the legal history of "race"), and for a woman with advanced degrees who claims expertise in social justice and race studies, etc., she seems completely blinded by her own self-involvement. This is a sad book, not the least of which is her own lack of self-awareness. Self-awareness is different from self-obsession, and this is a self-obsessed book. I'm sorry her parents punished her, and I'm sorry she felt like an outlier growing up, but she is not alone. Many people have difficult childhoods. Perhaps one of the worst aspects of her approach in identifying As Black is her misguided affinity for her own misperceptions of victimization. Now she dares to equate her position as similar to being transgendered. This is further proof of how little she comprehends outside of her own self-focus. Whatever childhood traumas she feels she suffered (assuming you can believe what she reports in the book) and the strict religious upbringing she had, they lend nothing to her explanation of why she believes herself to be Black. Race is indeed a social construct, but it is also organized around ancestry and phenotype, and is shaped by materially lived experience. Dolezal is at best naive and at worst a huckster. She has continued to exploit a lie that has done more damage than she knows. And her view of Blackness is one of the weirdest and screwiest. Simply put Blackness in all its prismatic possibilities is not determined by a childhood preference for a brown crayon, or a spray tan, or a good hair stylist. It's best to avoid speculation about this woman's troubled psyche, except to point out the obvious---that she seems to have a tremendous stash of unresolved feelings about her childhood and upbringing. It's a very sad and disturbing book.