ArcaMax

However, after some digging that included a public records request, Spokane television station KXLY said it could only confirm three incidents, none of which offered police enough evidence to prosecute anyone.

Admirable as Dolezal's civil rights work may have been, the cloud of suspicions over her reported hate crimes cast a dark cloud over the entire mission of her organization. When her leadership became a bigger distraction than a benefit, she had to go.

Yet Dolezal's negrophilia raises intriguing questions, including the validity of "transracial" as a description of her transformation. Many people raise the timely issue of whether Dolezal should be accepted as a self-made black, much as Caitlyn Jenner wants to be accepted as a woman.

That's a stretch too far in the minds of many. While Dolezal wants "to be perceived as black, in a racialized American environment where that matters," Meredith Talusan, a transgender writer-photographer writes in The Gaurdian, "(t)rans people transition in order to be the gender we feel inside."

Someday "there may come a time when posers will appropriate trendy trans culture for profit," she writes, but "right now, there's no advantage to transitioning when you're not trans."

Yet Dolezal also says she wants to look the way she feels inside. That's her right, as long as she's honest about it. Jenner made news by "living his truth," as many in the transgender community say. Dolezal lived a lie.

She chose to "identify as black." But the irony of her revolt against white privilege, many have noted, is in how much it displays her white privilege. Impatient with the challenge of demonstrating a genuine partnership with people of color, she apparently took the shortcut of cosmetic changes and brazen deception. Our racial culture already has enough lies without her adding to them.

========

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.