Incorporeal Blackness

Incorporeal Blackness: A Theorization in Two Parts—Rachel
Dolezal and Your Face in Mine
Marquis Bey
CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 20, Number 2, Fall 2020, pp. 205-241
(Article)
Published by Michigan State University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/773420
[ Access provided at 21 Feb 2021 20:11 GMT from Duke University Libraries ]
Incorporeal Blackness
A Theorization in Two Parts—Rachel Dolezal and Your Face
in Mine
Marquis Bey
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
Indeed, the concept of Blackness as located in the body cannot be sustained

by any serious further investigation. . .[L]ocating Blackness as a determinable
“thing,” as a “what” or “who” gives us a conceptualization that exhibits the
unnerving qualities of a mirage: from a distance, it appears clearly cogent, but
up close, Blackness evanesces, revealing no one shared quality that justifies
such frequent and assured use of this signifier.
—Michelle Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage
Epistemology
Now, one hears from a long time ago that “white is merely a state of mind.” I
add to that, white is a moral choice. It’s up to you to be as white as you want
CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2020, pp. 205–241. ISSN 1532-687X.
© 2020 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.
2050
206 Incorporeal Blackness
to be and pay the price of that ticket. You cannot tell a black man by the color
of skin, either.
—James Baldwin, “Black English: A Dishonest Argument”
The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable

and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that
which is good appears.” The attitude which it demands in principle is passive
acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing with-
out reply, by its monopoly of appearance.
—Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
FICTIONS ARE COMPILATIONS OF FASHIONED INVENTIONS, NARRATIVES WOVEN AROUND
the aim of coherence. Racial categorizations, by which I mean the histories,

hierarchies, socialities, cultures, and identities codified through variegated
hues of the epidermis and other physiognomic characteristics, are ulti-
mately fictions. But of course, this is not news, or at least shouldn’t be,
especially after the postmodern turn in the humanities. That even layper-
sons offhandedly deploy the phrase “race is a social construct” in admit-
tedly, frustratingly shallow effect might suggest that the arbitrariness of
“race”—which, to be sure, is not entirely my aim yet implicated in the theo-
rizations of this essay nonetheless—demands revisiting. The revisitation,
however, is not concerned with race per se but with blackness, blackness
not as, strictly speaking, a racial “category” but as something more, some-
thing that in fact fractures the project of racial categorizing sedimentation.
What I’ll assert as blackness’s incorporeality thinks more precisely about
blackness as an ethereal motility that exceeds the “actuality” of the pur-
ported cohesive and knowable body, outpacing normative rubrics of legibil-
ity. Incorporeal blackness, following Elizabeth Grosz’s theorizations on
the incorporeal, understands blackness in a way that engenders an
“ontoethics”—a commingling of what is as motivational for what might be—
that reveals “how [the world] is open to change, and, above all, the becom-
ings it may undergo,” and how the subjective materiality inhabiting the world
is “always more than itself. . .containing possibilities for being otherwise.” At
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base, incorporeal blackness has the capacity “to make us become other than
ourselves, to make us unrecognizable” (Grosz , , ). If we wish to
make the world anew, to dislodge all the normative, and hence violent,
frameworks from their hold over us, then we must commit to the terrifying
work of radical thinking. Refusing to open ourselves to the openness of gen-
der and racial self-determination—both of which refuse the normativity of
pragmatism, and live freedom in a radical trans politics, which might engen-
der nonracial and nongender life because these categories are at base hege-
monic impositions—can only be a troubling attempt to hold on to
normativity when it seems convenient or less scary.
By way of an incorporeal blackness, I seek to dwell on the implications
of a radical reorientation to the convergences of blackness and transness—
transed understandings of blackness, if you will, or what Angela Jones in an
e-mail exchange has described as the nothing new-ness of “people engaging
in trans practices around race”—and I specifically enter this through the
questions of blackness in the Rachel Dolezal affair and Jess Row’s novel
Your Face in Mine (). I tackle Dolezal’s case first, before Row’s novel
even though the novel precedes Dolezal’s “scandal,” because of my assump-
tion that she is more familiar to readers but also because delineating her
case will prove illuminative for the more novelistic and creative narrative of
racial reassignment in Row’s novel. Dolezal comes first here simply because
many of the ground-clearing claims are best processed through her. My
aim, to be clear, is to argue for neither the express validity of Dolezal’s
“passing,” nor the validity of “transracialism,” nor the championing of what
Row calls “racial reassignment surgery.” They are fraught topics that I will
only tangentially, skirtingly address and, ultimately, understand more com-
plexly than simply affirmation or rejection. In being less concerned with af-
firmation and acceptance of Dolezal (or Martin Wilkinson, Row’s
protagonist), I attempt to extricate “good feelings” or feelings of sympathy
for her from seeing her as an occasion that highlights how we might reas-
sess our intellectual and sociopolitical understandings of subjectivity, of
ontology, of what is possible for us to be in the world. I actually do not like
her, to be honest. She does not strike me as someone with whom I would
be friends, nor is she to me a “good” person. If I may, she is quite annoying,
antagonizing at times. And yet, I cannot get away from her. As a scholar of
black studies, black feminist theorizing, and transgender studies, I was
compelled—forced, really—by numerous colleagues and friends to state an
opinion of Dolezal. She proves absolutely pristine as a provocation for
thinking the relationship between blackness (or more imperfectly, race)
and transness (more imperfectly, racial and gender crossing), so I meditate
on her in the first section of this essay because I cannot not think about
her. I cannot not think about, in short, what she forces us to think.
My aim, then, is to proffer blackness’s incorporeality as a vector through
which to complicate the worn narrative surrounding Dolezal and transra-
cialism, delinking the argument from whether racial mutability is “a thing”
and moving toward a conception of blackness (not “race”) as conditioning a
certain ontological mutability and instantiating the possibility, and radical-
ity, of mobilizing a blackness to trans effects.
As an opening and definitional claim, blackness’s incorporeality means,
as Michelle Wright’s epigraph earlier delineates, that it evanesces, is
unfixed from physiognomy, is dislocated from the body. To think of black-
ness incorporeally is to fashion it around something indiscernible on the
grounds that normative assumptions of blackness cannot hold the fact that
many “black bodies” “can ‘pass for white’ or another ethnicity; many of
those bodies do not identify as Black, although they ‘look’ Black to us; and
those bodies may in turn encounter other bodies. . .and reject the notion
that African Americans are Black” (Wright , ). It is, in short, an asser-
tion of a radical indeterminacy that harbors within it a salvific mobilization
capable of engendering precisely the radical world many of us seek, yet
requiring of us a radical relation to subjectivity, to world making, to history.
“Blackness,” Kai M. Green says in an interview, “can hold so much” (alway-
salreadypodcast ). What is necessary is a more capacious definition of
blackness, one that can hold so much more than it is believed to be able to
hold, a capaciously inclusive blackness for which the inclusion is predicated
not on epidermal sufficiency but on an incorporeality, which is to say an
abandonment of the trappings of normative bodyness and its attending
ethical strictures, a modality of becoming away from given ontologies. This
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is precisely what Dolezal and Row’s novel offer, in myriad and sometimes
imperceptible ways.
There is an extent to which Dolezal’s “big reveal” and the subsequent
backlash against what she portends and actualizes is a spectacle, in Guy
Debord’s sense above. The extraordinary disapproval of her proximity to a
(or any) kind of blackness demands an unwavering acceptance from all
those who may deem themselves progressive, on the political Left, or
(black) feminist, foreclosing much dissent. What has been permitted to
appear is wholesale renunciation of Dolezal, but I seek in the present medi-
tation to open up this discourse and think within it, humbly and carefully
promote an active criticality, and warily reply with a timidly raised hand to
that which presumes the end of a discussion.
THE “DOLEZAL ‘AFFAIR’”
I don’t think that blackness is tied to any specific kind of racialized body.
—Fred Moten ()
Not all black people relate to the category or are marked by the category in
the same way. Your blackness might not be legible in certain places.
—Kai M. Green, “‘Race and Gender Are Not the Same!’ Is Not a Good
Response to the ‘Transracial’/Transgender Question OR
We Can and Must Do Better”
C. Riley Snorton asks in “Referential Sights and Slights,” “how does one
know that she is viewing a trans body? (And relatedly, how can one really
be sure that she is viewing a cisgender one?)” (, ). To dwell in the
profundity of such a seemingly simple question is to severely trouble
the assumptive logics undergirding recognition. Such is even more severely
the case when blackness enters, though it has always and already entered,
precisely because of blackness’s troubling and troublesome reputation. I
ask related to—but not analogical with—Snorton’s question, then, How
does one know they are viewing a black body? (And, relatedly, how can one
really be sure that the body before them is not black?) I aim not to collapse
the differing histories that bear on the respective meanings of race and gen-
der (nor do I presume that being ostensibly different constructs means
there is nothing to be gained in their mutual examination), but I do aim to
introduce a sociogenic provocation. To ask the question, a question that it
seems few ask and even fewer enact in social interactions, queries funda-
mental logics of optic recognition, and indeed interrogates the optic as the
arbiter of ontology. To ask the question places one tentatively in a different
position, a position of the mixed and disordered, the new terrains that mis-
and disregard hegemonic templates of legibility. And we might understand
blackness as I’ve described it via the incorporeal as emblematic of such a
praxis.
What follows is part one of the two-part argument indexed in the subti-
tle of this essay: that Rachel Dolezal provides an occasion to think other-
wise about blackness. To be frank, the question for my purposes is not if
she is black, whatever that is to mean; nor is the question whether she was
a “good” representation of blackness. [The thorniness of trying to argue in
defense of Dolezal’s “authenticity” is deeply, deeply fraught, as showcased
in Rebecca Tuvel’s article “In Defense of Transracialism” (), which was
met with significant backlash, and which I want to keep out of this medita-
tion.] Rather, the question is how Dolezal’s enactment of blackness allows
for something new and more radical to be known about it, a blackness that
was encountered as black for a decade, a blackness that propelled her into
spaces of black politics—the embodiment of an “escape from race perform-
ativity, mobilizing circumventions and interrogations of obligations to
racial comportment and the institutional conventions of racial rule” (Hesse
, ). What, in other words, does Dolezal allow us to know newly, dif-
ferently, more capaciously about blackness precisely as it relates to black-
ness as such, without the attending force of an exclusionary defensiveness
predicated on constructed metrics of somatic acceptability?
A defensiveness—which is, to be sure, an ethical, albeit misguided, reac-
tion to marginalization and oppression—surrounding who “gets to be”
black leaves us, as Jennifer Nash might argue, “stalled” (Garcia-Rojas ).
This defensiveness disallows new things to be known and, in particular,
new and radical things to be known about blackness. Blackness has always
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been contestable and open, and we cannot assert now that the conversa-
tion of its contours and effects are closed. That has never been the case. To
shift away from the defensiveness that seems to me to characterize disap-
proving responses to Dolezal will bring the benefits of what Nash terms let-
ting go. If renouncing Dolezal stems, in part, from a black (feminist)
defensiveness, what are the radical possibilities of including her, in letting
go of the exclusivity? I am arguing nonargumentatively, hopefully lovingly
and carefully, that a reading of Dolezal’s enactment opens up space to think
blackness incorporeally, an incorporeal blackness offering an ethics of non-
exclusion; indeed, incorporeal blackness is precisely “the possibility of a
nonexclusionary whole [that] is opened by the most radical critiques—
those of identitarian politico-esthetic thought in addition to those of post-
structuralism—of any prior holism” (Moten , ). The holism is the
very pursuit of a true, unadulterated, and hence exclusionary blackness
that is often cited against people like Dolezal, that she has not been a part
of this originary whole, that she wasn’t “born black.” Incorporeality obliter-
ates such a wholeness on the grounds that the wholeness is in fact a cage
that we would do best to heed blackness’s most radical calls to extricate, to
emancipate, ourselves from.
What follows is not a defense of Dolezal. I do not defend her; she is, it
seems to me, rather unlikeable and not the savviest interlocutor or de-
fender of herself. She preoccupies this essay because she provides some-
thing else to know and a different way of not only thinking but being made
to think differently. She provides a contemporary, incisive occasion to think
about the trans effects of blackness and, perhaps, the black effects of
transness.
Rachel Dolezal was a scandal. Her being “found out” caused the racial
brouhaha of , engendering humorous, passionate, and steadfast com-
mentary on race in the United States. Numerous people on Facebook,
Twitter, and other social media websites, not to mention the think pieces
on blogs and online magazines, added their two cents to the offering dish of
racial currency. Perhaps inevitably, right-wing conservatives took the over-
whelming invalidation of Dolezal’s blackness from the Left as fodder for
pointing out its hypocrisy in rejecting Dolezal’s “transracial” identification,
yet supporting Caitlyn Jenner’s transgender identification. How, they asked, is

Jenner’s transness legitimate, but Dolezal’s not? Or, as Adolph Reed Jr. ()
put it in the title of his essay on the matter—perhaps the most unequivocal in
condemning the Left for their purported hypocrisy, and arguing for the legiti-
macy of both transnesses—how is “one trans good, the other not so much”?
Rachel Dolezal was born to Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal, who were
Young Earth creationist Christians and adhered to religious tenets of salva-
tion through adoption, thus adopting four African American children after
birthing two children themselves, Rachel and her birth brother, Joshua. The
Dolezal family, in the late s through the s, lived in penurious con-
ditions. The family was poor, forced to grow their own food because they
“were nearly destitute,” and neither Larry nor Ruthanne had higher educa-
tion or dependable jobs. After leaving such an environment, which con-
sisted of physical and emotional abuse, gendered disciplining, sexual
violation, confinement, and labor exploitation, Rachel gradually began
dwelling in communities of black people, braiding hair, and making black
art. While attending college in West Jackson, Mississippi, she lived “in a
Black neighborhood,” and rather than missionizing the community as a
“white savior” or white “ally,” her dwelling amid blackness, so to speak, is
“where I felt most comfortable” (see Dolezal and Reback ). It was, in
other words, a dwelling that did not presume the community needed any-
thing from outside of it to validate it. If subjectivity is constituted socially,
and her sociality consisted of blackness in myriad forms, one must begin to
restructure to where blackness can extend. Such might describe, as Lyndon
K. Gill might argue, a “meta-identificatory” blackness, one that is located
outside and in excess of epidermalized raciality (quoted in Johnson ,
). This gives at least some credence, perhaps, to Dolezal’s claim that
“nothing about whiteness describes who I am” (though we can put pressure
on the “nothing”) (Dolezal and Reback , ). The tenets that constitute
whiteness, here understood as different and distinct from “white” people,
are refused, and her inhabitation of blackness is entered via an incorporeal
assemblic coming together of undercommon sociality. She refuses white-
ness, as I will detail more later, which is not an absolution but a gritty reck-
oning with how we must reconfigure where we locate whiteness. That is, if
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Dolezal can be rightly said to have refused whiteness via an intentional

black politics, a proximal sociality with blackness and black people, a refu-
tation of various privileges that accompany belief in one’s whiteness; and if
we take someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates at his word when he notes that the
culprits, as it were, of white supremacy are “those Americans who believe
that they are white” (Coates , ; emphasis added), then I am inclined,
difficult and controversial as it may be, to remove Dolezal radically (but
maybe not entirely) from whiteness, from being someone who believes she
is white. And that must mean something. I humbly submit that there is
privilege, which might be to say a certain type of whiteness, in the possibil-
ity of rejecting the blackness that swirls in uncertain proximity to her. With
this being the case, however, there is even more actualized radicality in
refusing to reject blackness’s proximity. That one can reject the Spillersian
“monstrosity” yet does not marks a steadfast commitment to dwelling with,
even in times of turmoil and the seductive allure of privilege, the generative
trouble.
Her body and phenotype are contestable, certainly, though I might
rejoin with the fact that many of “us” (“actual” black folks) have someone
in our family or community who looks very similar to Dolezal yet know
them to be black, and many of us too are fine with the blackness of some-
one like Walter White, who in fact was physically whiter than Dolezal. I
concede that her body is a contestable site on a theoretical level, though
otherwise it is much more difficult to make that concession because she,
pretty incontestably, lived her life as a black woman for years, unless one
wants to proffer their own racial evaluative metrics as pristinely superior
to all who encountered her—thousands of people—which ranges from
various black laypersons to National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) members to white racists looking for the
next Negro to harass. But because blackness is more closely aligned with
a certain mode of doing politicality, a certain way of eluding the grasp of
categorical captivity within (racial and gender, etc.) taxonomies,
Dolezal’s blackness for me manifests too, and maybe manifests primar-
ily, in an oppositional relation to wanting or desiring the benefits of
whiteness.
We must be clear that this conversation concerns her blackness, not

African Americanness, which she actually rejects (“After all,” she writes in
her memoir, “I didn’t identify as African American; I identified as Black”). It
is blackness with which I am concerned, and perhaps that with which I am
always concerned, as “Forms of naming based on ethnicity”—or, “African
Americanness”—“are often deployed in an attempt to deny the complexity
of what might and might not constitute blackness” (Walcott , xiv). The
complex incorporeal politicality that is blackness is not to be obscured by
rhetoric of sufficient ancestry that might constitute an “authentic” ethnic
identity. Blackness is the substantive force about which we are talking,
about which I urge we talk.
Attending a black church regularly, communing with black people, par-
ticipating in the Black Students Association, attending the historically
black Howard University, making art depicting black life and history, mar-
rying a black partner, having a black child: Dolezal immersed herself in
black culture, black people, black histories, and black institutions, all prac-
tices that surely would bolster the perceptual “authentic” blackness of one
recognized as epidermally black. Dolezal even identified an African
American man—Albert Wilderson Jr.—as her father, a chosen parentage
that surely brought with it teachings fueled by his life as one read as black.
Though this made her claims more suspect, as it fit the narrative of her
being motivated by pure prevarication, this in fact is a practice firmly
rooted in black and other racially marginalized cultures: the refashioning
and expanding and rethinking of kinship networks, full of “play cousins”
and “brothers from another mother” and aunties and sisters sharing no “bi-
ological” connection. Black folks have long been refashioning biographies
and family trees, subverting normative understandings of kinship.
If one wishes to think blackness in terms of subjection to white suprem-
acy, Dolezal still answers the call: being accosted by the microaggressions
of hair-touching and -commenting, exoticization of skin tone, “you people”
comments, racial profiling in the form of traffic stops, having nurses test
her incessantly for HIV because of the higher rates of the virus for black
women, complaints by aestheticians about her stubborn “African American
hair,” a Latinx beauty consultant’s comment about her “nappy” eyelashes.
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She has even met the ire of white supremacists, being threatened verbally
and physically, having her home broken into, being sent racist packages, all
because of the subversive racial justice work—which is to say, in substan-
tive part, the enactment of blackness—to which she committed herself.
And after all of this, if her blackness were mere artifice that she could don
only when convenient, she refused this; she did not, because, for her, she
could not, doff her blackness. “If I was looking to live an easier life, this
would have been a great time for me to opt out of being Black. Simply by
untwisting my braids and staying out of the sun, I could have crossed back
over the color line. This assumes, of course, that Blackness describes little
more than racialized physical features,” Dolezal writes (Dolezal and Reback
, –). She chooses blackness because she engages in the constant
ethical gesture of “paying the cost,” committing herself to dispossession
and making life with others in “this radical poverty-in-spirit” (Moten ,
). Blackness exceeds phenotype and exists somewhere else, in the inter-
stitial, perhaps even in the refusal of epidermalized or ontologized categori-
zation. In short, Dolezal refuses to refuse blackness.
The commentary that exploded in the wake of Dolezal’s “outing” was
multiply creative. On Facebook, Darnell L. Moore posted the status “‘don’t
wanna do the dishes. just wanna eat the food.’ —Solange. That’s a two-line
commentary on Rachel [Dolezal]”; a meme circulated of an Aunt Jemima
pancake box, superimposed with Dolezal’s face, with redacted text reading
“Ain’t Jemima”; and another person posted, in light of the black girl thrown
to the ground after cops raided a pool party in Texas back in June of ,
“My prob w/#Transracial: Black folk cant [sic] decide to be white when the
cops raid their pool party. But a white woman can be NAACP president.”
Other comments had a different connotation: one Tumblr user, enlivened
by Dolezal’s “transraciality,” identified as “transfat” (a fat person trapped in
a skinny person’s body); another, a white American, says “I’ve always expe-
rienced extreme nationality dysphoria, and recently realised it’s ethnic dys-
phoria too”; and a white man claimed that he identified as a black
American woman. All of these lead to rather thorny social terrain.
Succinctly, as one commenter responding to a Spokane newspaper’s cover-
age of Dolezal said, “If we (not I) feel gender choice/identification is up for
grabs, allowing anyone to choose and declare their gender. . .then why not
allow one to chose [sic] their color/ethnicity? How can our society have it
both ways? We either look for truth. . .or we allow anything goes and deal
with the fall out. . .which can be very destabilizing and tension producing”
(quoted in Brubaker , ). The logic of the commenter’s response is
that such a world would be undesirable, chaotic, and dystopic, as it would
be—by syntactical implication—antithetical to truth. But my aim is pre-
cisely their latter point: the “very destabilizing and tension producing”
world that such volatility engenders.
I argue that Dolezal had, “in a rage/rush to critique whiteness, some of
the nation’s top minds. . .reifying oppressive, exclusionary, and essentialist
notions of race” (Alim, Rickford, and Ball , ). No doubt it was easy to
tell ourselves, in nationalistic fashion, that Dolezal was merely another
white person appropriating blackness instead of considering that she might
be wishing to reject whiteness. Is this not what blackness, at least in one of
its many senses, is—the refusal of whiteness? Folks wanted her to be white;
folks wanted her to continue to be white, and when put this way I am trou-
bled even more. How disturbing it is that we wish her to remain a doer of
whiteness, when we know the violence by which it is constituted, by which
whiteness itself lives. We want radical world transformation. And yet, frus-
tratingly, when the radical possibility of this being enacted is actualized, we
become fearful. We become fearful, then, of justice, a necessarily mon-
strous, transfiguring “haunting, that not only disturbs logic, but also simul-
taneously, and necessarily, generates an opening onto alterity, to différance,
to a future, or futures, yet to come.” The incorporeally black is the “mon-
strous arrivant” for which those seeking a radical world must be prepared,
a preparation that foregoes attempts to define and delimit, know and pin
down, and opens fearfully fearlessly for “the modified (body of the) other”
(Sullivan , ). Detractors of Dolezal’s rebuking of whiteness, her
sociality-in-blackness, in fact hold on desperately to normativity. And I’m
not about that life.
But indeed, as Snorton makes clear, “transitions are always already
imbued with hierarchies of social value and the exponentialization of
choice is not equivalent with the democratization of human life” (quoted in
Marquis Bey 2170
Johnson , ). Prevailing definitions and classifications of social legibil-

ity, which is to say social recognition and viability, always constrict whom
one can become. These classifications, too, do violence to those who move
between and outside them. While surely one’s phenomenological experi-
ence of this betweenness will be shaped by what is deemed to be doable
and livable, it is the very move outside, the plunge, and more specifically
the force that motivates that plunge, that harbors the volatility in which I
am interested. My intention, then, is not to imply that Dolezal’s blackness
exists outside of hierarchical racial taxonomies or is bereft of troublesome
notions of valuing particular lives over others. Nor is it to suggest that
blackness’s incorporeality means that shallow racial electivity is the desira-
ble end. Rather, not only is Dolezal’s “transracial” performance “from”
“white” to “black” a telling one, as it critiques typical reactions of transi-
tions toward positions of relative privilege; but as well, incorporeal black-
ness, like H. Samy Alim’s theorization of “transracialization,” interrogates
taxonomic gestures themselves, refuses the hierarchy inherent in taxono-
mies, and instead of mere proliferation of “racial” identities seeks instead a
recalibration of “identities” themselves while privileging the space of open-
ness and indiscrimination—a generative, disruptive, critical space—as the
aim. We may, to be sure, experience our outsiderness in normative ways
(e.g., one may transition, say, from black to white, deconstructing the cate-
gories themselves, and yet still feel whiteness acting on them via interperso-
nal interactions, material benefits, etc.), but the dislocation of that force,
that urge, that desire to go outside, emphasis on the “go,” is the generative,
productive place that has caught my eye.
The desired coherencies of race are often implicitly and explicitly
deployed to maintain its “naturalness,” which makes Dolezal’s insistence
on her blackness despite her perinatal designation as epidermally white
frustrating for many. The claim is that she misrepresented and lied about
her “real” racial identity, but “‘Race’ is so very thin an idea,” we know from
Robert Reid-Pharr, “one dependent at best upon an embarrassingly clumsy
jumble of notions about origin and genealogy” (, ). Blackness is
infested with uncritically deployed epidermal or ancestral requirements
that we must unhinge from its popular sedimentation. I contend, then, that
detractors of Dolezal’s enactment of blackness—who are numerous, aca-

demically and nonacademically, across racial identities and positions—
think of it simply as racial identity but disregard or overlook that it is also,
and I might contentiously assert primarily, a political identity that exceeds
the epidermis, which might be how I am distinguishing between African
Americanness and blackness, between a “racial identity” and a modality of
politico-subjectivity. As Katharine Quarmby writes in an essay tellingly ti-
tled “Impostors,” Dolezal “continued to define herself as black, despite
mounting evidence that her blackness had come from a spray-tan salon
and hair weaves, not DNA.” Thinking about Harvard African American
studies scholar Werner Sollors’s term of “ethnic transvestites” (a term I
actually find to be transantagonistic and deeply problematic), Quarmby
asks tersely, “why do people feel the need to inhabit an identity that is not
their own?” (). Quarmby uncritically overlooks how blackness, even as
just racially dictated social positioning, is largely not about DNA or any
other “biological” factors and rather about social meanings attached to and
thus proxies for always-mediated “biological” traits. DNA becomes mean-
ingless—and is always meaningless—outside of the social, ergo the depth-
less deployment of superficially connoted “spray-tan salon and hair
weaves” should be not superficial but rather stitches of the performative
quilt that constructs all of our deeply felt identities. These are attempts to
superficialize Dolezal’s enactment of blackness by referencing the mutabil-
ity of her skin tone and hair—as if this is not also the case with “black” peo-
ple—and in fact troublesomely index transantagonistic logics, for example,
that one is less, say, a trans man because he removes his chest binders
when not in public. Dolezal’s racial identity, like all racial identities, is per-
formative. On this score, “there is no internal ‘truth’ to race,” argues Nadine
Ehlers. “Rather, through being read as ‘belonging’ to a particular racial cate-
gory—that is, visually appearing and conducting one’s acts, manners, and
behaviors in accordance to disciplinary racial demands—all subjects are
passing for a racial identity that they are said to be” (, ). Dolezal
passes for black, sure, but so then does Cornel West, Toni Morrison, Ta-
Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, and any other “black” person you can
name. That is to say, maybe she wasn’t “born black”—but no one is; no
Marquis Bey 2190
one is inherently and from the jump the bevy of complex sociohistorical
and political and cultural and linguistic and aesthetic characteristics that
define prominent strains descriptive of blackness. (In other words, black-
ness is not static or immutably possessed even by those who are “indisputa-
bly” black. Even the “black man” cannot be discerned by skin color, as
Baldwin’s epigraph contends; even some of “us” do not get to stay “us” and
are condemned to whiteness, Green argues.) But, as Dolezal aptly claims,
“that’s hardly the only way to define Blackness.” The discourse attempting
to essentialize blackness into an originary and immutable natal hue echoes
transantagonistic discourses of delineating “women” as “women born
women” (or “womyn born womyn”). And it operates on making blackness
external, immutable, and burdensome, which implies that blackness’s non-
externality, openness, mutability, and fluidity ought to be feared—a fear
(phobia) of crossing or mutable (trans) blackness, trans/phobia. This then
leads to the denigration, mocking, and pathologization of those who can or
do trans their race, which may even lead, in some instances, to a marked
antiblackness, as Green has articulated. Consolidating blackness merely
into the lackluster heft of bornedness presumes it to be an axiomatic and
self-evident signifier that bears no textured, mutable, historical, phenome-
nological, or political relation to living. Blackness is not simply a matter of
flippantly choosing which tired racial tropes one will perform today, only to
be stripped once one gets home. One does blackness, and thus becomes
black, because it “is a matter of reiterating or repeating the norms by which
one is constituted: it is not a radical fabrication of a gendered [or racial]
self.” One is subjectivated by this repetition, and the blacknesses that one
reiterates, that one makes a practice, “cannot be thrown off at will” as they
“work, animate, and constrain the. . .subject, and which are also the resour-
ces from which resistance, subversion, displacement are to be forged”
(Butler , ).
It is often presumed that there is an innate, immutable, knowable core
truth to racial identity that cannot be superseded or circumvented. One of-
ten presumes, in short, that there is an essence to racial identities that is
intrinsic to that race. Transgression of such truths marks one as suspect.
But I want to argue for the identificatory consequentialness of not only
one’s own self-identification—which always matters, no matter how much

it seems to depart from an “objective reality,” and is a foundation in trans
studies, the point of departure in fact—but misrecognition as well. That
is, it has been argued to me on two occasions that the decade during which
Dolezal was read as black, unquestionably, was in fact a misreading of her;
she was, it has been argued, misrecognized, and thus we should not use
that decade as valid evidence because it was all predicated on a fallacious
misreading. Such an argument, though, is itself fallacious and quite mis-
guided in its presumption of how subjectivity is formed. “Misrecognition,”
Snorton writes, “is as important as recognition in the production of self, as
the quality of feeling misrecognized/unseen/wrongly viewed serves as a
context for the emergence of selfhood.” That Dolezal was “misrecognized”
as black still nevertheless constitutes her as black, allows her to emerge
into the sociality of blackness. Now in the moment of the exposure not sim-
ply of Dolezal’s natal whiteness but of our collective misrecognition of
such, we are presented with an opportunity: to think about how misrecog-
nition offers the chance to reexamine racial scripts. Again, Snorton writes,
“the possibility of misrecognition carries with it the opportunity for deliber-
ation and the potential rejection of social scripts, which get mapped onto
one’s body” (, –). This opportunity is what I am using to think dif-
ferently about blackness, because, to quote Hortense Spillers, “every mem-
bership is not natal—in fact, most of them are not—so that the difference to
the latter must be comprehended as a genuine possibility” (, ; empha-
sis in original). Dolezal, in refusing membership in whiteness, refusing to
adhere to its rules, provides genuine possibility.
Dolezal refused capturability and exceeded logics of racialization. She
exposed the limits of this logic, escaped it, refused it, and made a subjectiv-
ity through the incorporeal site of transition. To accept Dolezal is to open
ourselves up to capacious openness, which is at base a pursuit of a nonvio-
lent encounter with otherness that aims to put pressure on and expand the
ethical encounter. This radical openness to radical openness is the doing of
incorporeal blackness, as it is to live and embody insurgency through high-
lighting what Sandy Stone calls the myriad of alterities that are trans
embodiments. The affair engendered by a black incorporeal posture
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“advocate[s] for the intelligibility of (un)becoming other”—that undone and

undoing incorporeal space of blackness (Elliot , ; emphasis in origi-
nal). This space may be radically different than what we expected, which
is to say that taking social construction seriously and moreover taking
trans seriously might look like Rachel Dolezal. We cannot wish for fun-
damental, radical change without also putting at imminent risk our own
assumptions and, indeed, in a very real sense, our deepest tethers to our
bodies.
YOUR FACE IN MINE AND ASSUMING RACIAL IDENTITY
You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. I
call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront
mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my
words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.
—Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of
Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”
In other words, passing confounds our visually privileging cultural logic. It

confuses the real with the artifice, and often even after a careful social excava-
tion, it is hard to determine which is what.
—C. Riley Snorton, “‘A New Hope’: The Psychic Life of Passing”
Thankfully, Jess Row published Your Face in Mine in , a year before the
Dolezal affair came to light, because on his account he is not sure he could
have written the novel if Dolezal had been “outed” while he was writing it.
Your Face in Mine (Row ) is a useful juxtapositional text for thinking
with Dolezal, incorporeal blackness, and “changing” racial identification.
The novel follows Kelly Thorndike, a white man who, after two decades,
bumps into an old high school friend and bandmate, Martin Wilkinson (né
Limpkin). In the opening scene of the novel, Kelly recognizes Martin on a
visceral, ambiguous level, an ambiguity that is justified, namely because
Martin, a fellow white kid growing up with him in Baltimore, is now epider-
mally and phenotypically “black.”
After some expectedly shocking conversations, Kelly learns that Martin

has undergone “racial reassignment surgery” for Martin’s self-described
“Racial Identity Dysphoria Syndrome”: in short, being “born in the wrong
physical [racial] body” (). Kelly, a -year-old polyglot, widower (his
Chinese wife and daughter died in a car accident only three years before
the novel’s opening), Harvard doctoral defector of Chinese studies, and
recently laid off manager of a troubled public radio affiliate, is hired by
Martin to be his biographer. At first his motives seem to be centered
around crafting a narrative for the validity and nonweirdness of racial reas-
signment surgery, but readers discover later in the text that his rationale is
a bit more mercenary than initially admitted. After having already paid
upward of $, for the surgery, Martin enlists Kelly to craft his story
for the world with an enticing $,. Kelly reads journal entries Martin
wrote pertaining to his racial identity, prepubescent narratives of racial
identification, listens to hours of recordings of Martin’s conveyance of his
racial bildungsroman, and asks murky questions of Martin and his wife,
Robin (an African American woman). So, because conclusive events of the
novel virtually quash any chance of the story getting written, perhaps a pre-
liminary bio of Martin Wilkinson would read as follows:
Martin Wilkinson’s life trajectory is, on his account, “the story of the
fucking century” (). Self-diagnosed as having “Racial Identity Dysphoria
Syndrome” (because he believes “it is in many ways similar to the gender
dysphoria that is so commonly reported in the news” []), which he says
has caused many “psychological problems, including depression, agorapho-
bia, and involvement in illegal activities” (), Martin has the “inarguable”
and “unquestionabl[e]” () appearance of a black man, never in his seven
years as epidermally black having been read or understood as any racial
categorization other than black. His first encounter with a black person
came when he was four years old. It was his clearest memory, he recalls. A
black woman “was sitting at the picnic table on the back patio, where we
had meals in the summer,” he recounts.
She had been crying. There were tracks of tears on her cheeks. But when she
saw me her mouth split into this enormous grin, the widest mouth, the
Marquis Bey 2230
friendliest mouth, I had ever seen in my life. A slice of the sun. She laughed,
and she said, where did you come from? And I just wanted to run to her. Hell,
maybe I still am running to her. (–)
The racist and minstrel-allusive imagery (the “Smiling Darky” caricature is

certainly present) of the black woman should certainly give us pause and
cause us to question any latent fetishistic understandings Martin had of
black women. Nevertheless, that he is running toward a black woman, or at
least her image, is consequential, especially in light of Martin’s birth-moth-
er’s absence. Martin remembers little of his birth mother, Katherine. “She’s
just a shadow,” he says, “an afterthought. [But] I was born, wasn’t I?
Though sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. It seems almost like something
to mention in parentheses. Oh, yeah, her” (). Katherine was a nonfigure,
unsubstantive, lacking even a last name: “she never told anyone her last
name. Straight up refused. It’s not even on my birth certificate: Katherine
Doe” (). Because nonpersons, which is effectively what lacking a name
renders one (in the sense that a person is a possessor of a name), cannot be
said to “properly” exist, Martin had to be birthed by other means. Those
means, those “othermothering” means, was a black woman. This alterna-
tive kinship is something we’ve seen with Dolezal and her father, Albert
Wilderson Jr., and like Dolezal’s “other fathering,” this is a practice that
might be said to have rhizomatic roots in blackness.
In addition to this childhood introduction to blackness, Martin
attended the virtually all-black El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz Elementary. He
was, in fact, “the first white kid to enroll there in eight years, since they’d
changed the name from Paul Revere” (). Shabazz—the surname of the
nation’s most prominent black nationalist and thus, in other words, one of
its most potent sites of a certain kind of blackness—was Martin’s “gateway
into the world” (). At Shabazz is where he indeed came into the world
and its sociality, which is the condition, arguably, of recognition, itself the
condition for social existence. In short, Martin socially existed for the first
time via blackness. It is arguable, then, that because the black woman, sans
white birth mother, is the maternal figure to whom he is running, and
because of Shabazz’s hold over him, Martin was birthed in and through
blackness. To the extent that to “be” black is still operational under latent
logics of partus sequitur ventrem, that he entered into the world in many
ways through a black woman shrouds him in blackness, and his intellec-
tual, social, and even linguistic inculcation (Martin notes, “I spoke, effec-
tively, black English” []) was mired in blackness—all are constitutive
nodes of subjectivity and engines of politics.
It was not until the spring of  when his best friend, Alan, commit-
ted suicide, however, that he began to do the “radical rethink[ing]” ()—
another way of saying the “genuine thinking” that is black thought, the will-
ful and intentional act of “imagination and invention” promulgated by
blackness (see Sexton ; Spillers , )—that fomented his decision to
undergo racial reassignment. This radical rethinking culminated in radi-
cally rethinking racial logics and porosity. His racial phenotype is “based on
a carefully created medical procedure that was carried out in Bangkok,
Thailand, from –, by Dr. Binpheloung Silpasuvan and his medical
associates,” in which Martin underwent “a series of facial surgeries, scalp
surgeries, body-sculpting procedures, and pigmentation treatments, trans-
forming me from my original appearance as a Caucasian-Jewish ‘white’
male into a convincing African American” (). With a change in appear-
ance, he also changed his familial lineage, telling others that he was the
child of two now-deceased black parents and had no knowledge of his “bio-
logical roots” (). With minor daily maintenance practices, his transition
in/to blackness is complete. What Martin is calling for is the abandonment
of the pretense that biology is at all determinative of one’s subjectivity. He
is urging us to unlearn normative familial networks and to radically trans
the familially constitutive aspects of subjectivity. Martin’s “real” birth
parents, or Larry and Ruthanne for Rachel Dolezal, do not finish, and per-
haps do not even begin, one’s racialized becoming-in-the-world. More
broadly, this is a total unfixing of blackness from what is presumed to be bi-
ological. Thinking with this, I offer blackness as a name for the incorporeal
force that subverts what Talia Bettcher calls the “categorical gesture” to-
ward fixed identificatory meanings of hegemonic, immutable templates. I
want to read a trans feminist theorization through my iteration of incorpo-
real blackness here, that is, if Bettcher’s categorical gesture is one that
Marquis Bey 2250
“move[s] to fix the meaning of expressions like ‘woman,’ ‘trans,’ ‘person of

color,’ and so forth,” and if trans is an analytic and subjective attempt, simi-
lar to the texture of incorporeality, to subvert such a gesture, noting the
gestural categoricality of “To be black, you have to do/be x” or other essen-
tializing and fixing commentary means that it is necessary to get outside of
such logics (Bettcher and Goulimari , ).
As an incorporeal term, blackness will always adhere to performative
subjectivities in hegemonically contestatory ways inasmuch as legible cor-
poreality is a requisite for being a viable subject, a recognizable subject.
Indeed, incorporeal blackness might also do the work of refusing to disclose
reality-enforced “biological” or “ancestral” sedimentations of selfhood that
Bettcher’s trans feminism also seeks to contest. In other words, if “trans”
might refuse the (genitally determined) corporeality on which gender is
“reality enforced,” incorporeal blackness might, too, refuse the hold of any
legible bodily determinant of one’s blackness. The incorporeality of black-
ness, in its intimacy with transness, refuses a “reality-enforcement” com-
prised of “identity invalidation, the appearance-reality contrast, the
deceiver-pretender double bind,” and what might here, racially inflected, be
an ancestral or natal epidermis that can serve as a complement to the gen-
der-inflected “genital verification” (Bettcher b, ).
Interestingly, upon learning all of the racially reassigned information,
Kelly describes Martin as “unhinged” and, even more interestingly, as “a
question mark” (). Martin, at base, is a question, and one that foments
the recalibration of our assumptions. Martin subverts our categorizing
assumptions, disallowing us not only to assume others’ accidental ontolo-
gies but our own as well—indeed, ontology qua Ontology.
The basic premise of Your Face in Mine is not new, as we’ve seen such
racial reassignment in Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal, John Howard
Griffin’s Black Like Me, C. Thomas Howell’s Soul Man, and George S.
Schuyler’s Black No More, and Row’s writing style—a subdued satiric medi-
tation on racial identification and its discontents—echoes that of other
contemporary novelistic satirists like Percival Everett and Mat Johnson.
What I find most useful in Your Face in Mine is its fraught meditation on
the assumption of an identity, that is, the prejudgment of a state of affairs
(to echo the affair of Dolezal’s blackness) without evidentiary basis—or by

way of uncritically examined “evidence”—as well as the taking on or pos-
session of an identity. Though internal critiques of the validity of racial
reassignment abound within the novel and are used as argumentation
against the validity of racial reassignment by reviewers of the novel, my
interests lie in what the novel depicts as a critique of assuming (prejudging
and taking on) identities, both in its general plot as well as in the intersti-
tial, perhaps unintended spaces between the literal and proverbial lines of
the text. In other words, I am reading Row against himself, against his own
intentions. Though Kelly also ultimately undergoes racial reassignment to
become the Chinese Curtis Wang, and is perhaps a much more interiorly
complex character, my focus will be largely on Martin because he seems to
be the richest site of thinking the incorporeal relative to blackness.
I challenge reviewer Emily Raboteau’s claim that “Of course, Row’s key
figure isn’t a black man but a white man in blackface.” The very opening of
“Of course” is a totalizing, no-room-for-interrogation claim that precludes
any entry into the otherwise of racialization. I also challenge David L. Ulin’s
similar claim that Martin “is, after all, a white man masquerading as
African American” (Raboteau ; Ulin ; emphasis added). If Martin’s
blackness is a mere masquerade, a mere mask, then it is a damn good one
as I presume, quite seriously, that when Kelly sees him at the beginning of
the novel “bundled in a black lambswool coat with the hood up” (), he is,
like any other nonmasquerading black man, subject to the murderous
whim of white supremacy, given potency by that hooded signifier of black-
ness. He has entered into blackness in space and time. Though he certainly
has not entered the door that most have been thought to enter, he has none-
theless entered—maybe through the secret entrance in the basement—and
does blackness, though troublesomely, as blackness always does. There are
those who note that blackness is a phenomenological and existential inhabi-
tation of a positionality, which is to say subjection to white supremacy, one
in which those merely masquerading as black do not experience and, if they
do experience it, can choose to remove when they wish. This, however, is not
the case with Martin Wilkinson (nor, I would argue, Rachel Dolezal). Martin
has effectively checked the existential boxes of feeling blackness under white
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supremacy: surrounded by black folks since his formative years, speaking the
language of blackness, being shot due to inhabitation of a geographical loca-
tion and condition the result of redlining and white flight; he has been in
prison, he is married to another black person, he attended a black church
regularly (and met his wife there). To be sure, “blackness” is not to be
reduced simply to a series of experiences (or is it?), nor is experiencing black-
ness determined solely by the dictates of white supremacy. Blackness is
many, no doubt. My assertions aim only to insert Martin into the very dis-
course others would use to deem a person who was “born white” unfit for a
valid black identity, troubling the very qualifications for the proverbial Black
Card. To revise James Baldwin, I ask: If Martin Wilkinson isn’t black, then tell
me, who is (and why)?
Inevitably, such racial reassignment, because race is a relational con-
cept, affects those around Martin in visceral ways. When Kelly is thoroughly
convinced of Martin’s seamlessness, he immediately notes, “All at once I
feel an intense, pressurized pain in my sinuses, my forehead, eye sockets,
across the bridge of my nose: as if my own face has become inflatable and
is about to lift off” (). Why, one asks, is Kelly so viscerally affected? I
would posit that it is because blackness betides us all; blackness, as incor-
poreal, lays claim to Kelly as well and, when accosted so (in)corporeally
with it, is forced to feel its force. Kelly is forced to concede the constructed-
ness of his own identity when seeing what he shouldn’t be seeing in Martin:
the refashioning of a racial identity that is said to be immutable. Kelly’s
sutures are exposed in this moment, and the pressure comes from that
“anarchic womb,” implicating him in the all of transitivity.
Just as “the surgically constructed genitalia of trans people can be trans-
phobically viewed as at odds with the genitalia that nature intended”—which
Bettcher calls “moral genitalia”—Martin’s surgically constructed epidermis
and phenotype can be transphobically viewed as at odds with his “natural”
or “god-given,” and thus morally obligatory, racial identification. He and
those like him are then forced to undergo some kind of “reality enforcement”
in the form of comments like, “But you’re really a white man” or the previous
commentary of David Ulin and Emily Raboteau, or more fatal ones like mur-
der (Bettcher b, ). But it is this very reality being enforced that
Martin wants to in many ways supplant. Even he succumbed to it when he

first went to Bangkok to have his surgery, encountering a trans woman who,
to prove the expertise of Dr. Silpasuvan, allowed him to look as closely as he
wished at her naked body to see that, as Martin tells Kelly, “she seemed one
hundred percent. . . .It was complete” (). What I find most interesting in
the same conversation, though, is Martin’s plea for Kelly to believe his
blackness.
“So this is what I’m saying: what do I have to show you, Kelly?”
“To convince me it’s real? I believe it’s real. How could I not?”
“To believe it was always real. I’m not talking about etiology. I’m not talk-
ing about cause. We can speculate about the circumstances all we want—
later. Right now I’m just talking about the fact of the phenomenon. I was a
black boy in a white boy’s body. I was a black man in a white man’s body. Can
you accept that, Kelly? Can you really believe it’s possible, when it comes
down to it? I need to know. Before we go any further, I need to know.”
“I believe you.”
“No, see that’s not the same. You believe it because I’m saying it. I’m not
asking you to accept the words. I’m asking you to accept the thing itself. The
possibility that—”
“Yeah, I get it. You don’t have to repeat yourself.” (–; emphasis in
original)
Martin is interested in the anteorigin of blackness, the blackness of before

that has engendered his subjectivity. It is not a blackness that comes after
the fact, or a blackness that is merely epidermalized at a definitive point in
time; it is a blackness that causes, one that is always doing the work of per-
turbing ontology. The final statements as well mark a rich site of entry. At
face value Martin is simply interrupted by Kelly, who wants only to hurry
the discussion along by interjecting with his ultimate belief in the probity
of Martin’s claim to a kind of racial authenticity. But there seems to be
more operating. In other words, I want to read the exchange as Martin’s
request for Kelly to believe “The possibility that—” period. That is, to believe
in possibility, incorporeality, the openness of possibility not predicated on
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criteria bestowed to become legible to ontologics that are ultimately unable

to handle that which falls outside of their constrictions. We cannot assume
Martin was going to finish the sentence; we cannot assume he was going to
close his sentence. If he is asking Kelly to accept his incorporeal blackness,
we must in fact maintain that he could not finish the sentence because
what he is asking of Kelly is to accept, simply, the space of transition, or
“possibility that—.” The em dash is a time-space marking the impossibility
of knowing that which cannot be said. It may in fact fall outside of (legible)
time, an assertion supported by Kelly himself. Furthermore, that Martin is
urged not to repeat himself indexes this phenomenon and signifies the
inability to capture blackness, to grasp and contain in narrative the fugitiv-
ity of blackness. “You don’t have to repeat yourself” because possibility and
openness cannot be repeated; they can only be discerned in nonemergence
of what cannot yet be said.
As he talks to another character, Julie-nah, about his motivations for
going through with Martin’s racial reassignment biographical exposé, Kelly
divulges, “This isn’t really happening. . .That’s how I feel. It isn’t really hap-
pening” (). This feeling arises not via some kind of obfuscation of “reality”
or stress-induced misjudgment but something more complex, something
more temporal:
What’s the word, I ask her, what’s the tense, for an experience that happens
neither then, nor now, but out of time? An experience that never should have
happened at all? Isn’t there a word for that?
We’ll have to make one up, she says, smiling. She likes a game. We should
try Scrabble. Not subjunctive, but anti-junctive. Contra-junctive.
Contra-conditional.
Yeah. Good. Contra-conditional. ()
We might argue here that, in conversation with Calvin Warren and

Michelle Wright, they are describing Black Time. Whereas Wright would
argue that we are “Black in time,” meaning that blackness is always concep-
tually a space-time identification, a when and where rather than a what;
and Warren would argue for an operational “black time,” a “time without
duration. . .a horizon of time that eludes objectification, foreclosing idioms

such as ‘getting over,’ ‘getting through,’ or ‘getting beneath,’” my under-
standing and interpretation of this altered notion of temporality is a refusal
to adhere to temporal meaning (Wright ; quoted in Colbert, Patterson,
and Levy-Hussen , ). Because their subject is Martin’s blackness, it
cannot be placed snugly and definitively in (legible) time, which makes it
fall out of time. That Martin-as-black-man “never should have happened”
operates on the syntax of a phenomenological event (“happened”) whose
probability (“should”) is negated (“never”). Thus, Martin-as-black-man
exceeds probability—he is in excess of the probable, of the possible because
he is identificatory space that cannot be temporally mapped definitively.
He is not-to come (“contra-conditional”; in contradiction to a condition of
possibility), or in other words, he is to unbecome. In two other words, he is
incorporeally black.
No coincidence, then, that we have come to grammar, what it can do,
what it can hold—or can’t. Unspoken and assumed, grammar structures
and subtends speech, action, and legibility. Grammar foundations that
which is deemed possible. Grammar underwrites all that is conveyable by
affixing it to readable and interpretable logics. Within hegemonic racial
grammar, Martin is “temporarily invisible: a fugitive in your own place, in
your own time” (). Tellingly he is twice described as slippery: “I mean, he
was slippery,” Kelly says in trying to recall what Martin was like as a teen-
ager (); “He was slippery. . .Always kind of a mystery,” he says again
when trying to make sense of the difficulty the hired private investigator
had in tracking down Martin’s past (). Martin effectively undoes gram-
mar by indexing Alan, his best friend and catalyst for his radicality.
Peculiarly, when Alan spoke to people on the phone he would “hang up in
the middle of a sentence” because, according to sixteen-year-old Kelly, “he’s
opposed to time. . .And grammar. He thinks all periods should be replaced
by semicolons” (). Semicolons mark both a stoppage and an imminent
continuation, a “to come,” an etcetera. But even more open than this, at the
“end” of Alan’s life “there was no period, or semicolon; there was just
silence. There was just”: (; emphasis in original)—openness, incorporeal-
ity, another way to be and become that could not be captured by
Marquis Bey 2310
grammatical dictates. Alan’s life neither stopped nor alluded to a continua-

tion; rather, it was simply open, other than itself, other than grammatical
being. And Martin is just like Alan. “Part of his mind was always elsewhere,
she says. But in that sense he was just like Alan” (). Both Martin and
Alan are always in grammatical elsewhere. The space of transition is an
elsewhere, a space that troubles grammar and time (and space) because it
refuses their logics.
CODA
Existing ontologies of blackness capture it in the epidermis by way of think-

ing it in terms of a historical condition, effectively obscuring its unruliness
and incorporeality (to fix it in a historical trajectory by definition disallows
it from being other than it was). What might be so radical in this essay is
that blackness is dis/located in the transgressive interstitial space that
escapes historically bound scripts; in the space of the “unthought,” the out-
skirts of history’s order(ing) is where we might find the blackness about
which I am speaking, the blackness of the “born white” who nonetheless do
blackness unapologetically, or the blackness of the refusal of being fixed by
logics of sedimented racialization—incorporeal blackness. Dolezal, and
Martin Wilkinson too, was an event that exceeded the legibility of norma-
tive optics because the enactment of incorporeal blackness is the event of
becoming-unbecoming, which necessarily is that which escapes the engen-
dering force of history. What Dolezal and Wilkinson do is show up to the
call of blackness when it is presumed (by whom?) that they should not.
Authoritative calls of racial interpellation interrupt the intended narrative
by answering a call purportedly not for them. As what James Martel calls
“misinterpellated subjects,” Dolezal and Wilkinson present radical potential
because they show up anyway to calls “not for them,” thus challenging inter-
pellative force. They are “uninvited subjects” that show “up and refus[e] to go
away” (Martel , ). For Dolezal to commit herself to blackness even after
being “found out,” to continually affirm that “I identif[y] as Black,” she rejects
detractors’ interpellative call to subjectivate her into whiteness. And again, is
this not what blackness, at least in part, is—the rejection of whiteness’s
seduction? Both Dolezal and Wilkinson externalize the anarchic multiplicity,

the anoriginal lawlessness, of the heteronymous self; both Dolezal and
Wilkinson expose the inadequacy of the interpellative call by showing up out
of place and thus critique normative ordering.
Dolezal and Martin Wilkinson, as manifestations of incorporeal black-
ness, incite the monstrous, the feared unknown and unknowable. Because
they transmogrified their bodies, which is to say gave themselves in the
service of grotesque, transgressive disruption. And is this not what incorpo-
real blackness does, render strange and “unnatural” what we thought was
set in proverbial stone? It is the unknown of what can arise, what can
queerly arise. “Here be monsters” cartographers would write on unvisited
territories. But what happens when we listen to and open ourselves up to
the monsters? Let us listen to them—but “Be forewarned, however, that
taking up this task will remake you in the process” (Stryker , ).
NOTES
. Notably, though, because I have no patience for transantagonism and trans exclusionary
radical feminists, Grosz has expressed her materialist feminism in antitrans ways in this
very text. Namely, she writes:
However queer, transgendered, and ethnically identified one might be, one comes
from a man and a woman, and one remains a man and a woman, even in the case
of gender-reassignment or the chemical and surgical transformation of one sex
into the appearance of another. . . . Sexual difference is still in play even to the
extent that one identifies with or actively seeks the sexual organs and apparatus of
the “opposite” sex: at most one can change the appearance and social meaning of
the body, but the sexually specific body that is altered remains a sexually specific,
if altered, body. (–)
Grosz overlooks what purportedly unmeditated sexual difference being “still in play” means,
especially outside of sociality and the ways in which the social always, and already, deter-
mined what can be known about the so-called axiomaticity of sexual difference. Too, there
is an air of irony that Grosz called for the radical otherwise of the world while remaining
steadfastly hemmed by such conservative thinking, thinking that has long been critiqued by
queer theorists. Sexual specificity means little, if anything, outside of social meanings—
indeed, social meanings are meanings qua meaning. One might not, in fact, be born “from a
Marquis Bey 2330
man and a woman,” as IVF, trans male pregnancies, intersexuality, and the like trouble
such a claim.
. From an e-mail conversation occurring on May , .
. From an e-mail conversation occurring on September , .
. The analogy is exactly what often gets folks in trouble. I do not claim an analogy
between race and gender, as if they can be substituted for one another in the relevant
questions here (e.g., if you can be transgender then you can be transracial). The analogy
collapses the specificities of each. But the goal is also not to abandon analogy, as if anal-
ogy can create no meaning, as if all identificatory concepts are discrete and bear no
relation to one another. As Green writes in the piece cited in the epigraph, “Gender in
the way that I understand it is also, like race, a bio-social-historical category that we all
move through in different ways at different times.”
. I turn to Kai M. Green again on this point, who writes “We cannot just end the conver-
sation because it makes us uncomfortable or angry. We must ask ourselves: What are
the similarities between gender and race? What does this relationship reveal to us?
How, why and when does it make us uneasy?” (). But I also turn, in additional sup-
port, to Susan Stryker here. Stryker has written that
Most of us working in the social sciences and humanities have internalized the inter-
sectional social-constructionist mantra that gender is not race is not class is not abil-
ity is not x nor y nor z, that each vector of embodied difference must be accounted
for according to its own particular histories, material circumstances, operative logics,
and experiential consequences. And yet, this very imperative not to substitute anal-
ogy for analysis risks foreclosing an opportunity to explore how claims of race-change
and claims of sex-change might be alike, as well as how they differ. . . .
An actual point of connection between race and sex is that both name cul-
tural processes that transform physical attributes of bodily being—phenotypes, on
the one hand, and morphology and reproductive potential, on the other—into
guarantors of social positionality: they are mechanisms for hierarchizing differen-
ces, methods for attempting to fix a social hierarchy in place by rooting it, through
a set of beliefs and practices about the meaning of the material body, in our biolog-
ical substance.” (Stryker ; emphasis in original)
It is often held that race and gender are different—that the former is “externally
derived” and the latter “internally derived,” as Tina Fernandes Botts says, which make
them radically disanalogous (2018)—and thus they cannot be thought along similar tra-
jectories. But as Green and Stryker clarify, they have deep overlap and operate along
similar lines of subjective disciplining, attempting to situate in a social grid, and repri-
mand for transgression. Refusing to think them together means that we also refuse to
allow them to impact each other, make one another do different things, learn from one
another.
. I am in full agreement with my friend and colleague Angela Jones, with whom I share an
intellectual affinity regarding Dolezal. Jones wrote to me on May ,  in response to
the furor over Tuvel’s article, again via e-mail, “First, I wouldn’t deadname a trans per-
son even if they do. So, some people have said that Caitlyn Jenner often refers to her
past using the name Bruce. So, if it is fine for her, it is fine for us. I don’t like this logic.
Second, the largest issue for me is the lack of engagement with trans studies or critical
race theory. Tuval [sic] wrote a piece that squarely fits in both these literatures, but yet
doesn’t engage with them at all. For example, where is [Rogers] Brubaker or [Kai M.]
Green? Third, I found a lot of the language choice really off putting (biological sex, male
genitalia, etc.). Fourth, I did not like Tuval’s [sic] initial summary/discussion of sex and
gender. Finally, the paper seemed to regurgitate a lot of [Christine] Overall’s work, add-
ing nothing new to the discussion.” We might also add to this Tina Fernandes Botts’s
() argument that a big issue was the use of analytic philosophy, which is perhaps
ill-equipped to handle questions of phenomenological, existential, identificatory, histori-
cal weight.
Both of us would have, on these grounds, rejected the article had we been reviewers,
but the article did not prove to be an ethical breach—the rationale for retraction—just
shoddy scholarship. To my mind, the follow-through on many of the claims she makes
are sound, if uncited and characteristic of philosophical navel-gazing and thought-
experimentalizing. I saw few, if any, refutations of the article’s arguments and much on
simply bad feelings about it.
. Specifically, Gill writes: “a meta-identificatory sense [means] resisting the convenience
of identity labels in favor of more fluid principles and more concrete politics”; “this is
precisely what queerness in its most theoretically expansive sense was meant to do—
make us uncomfortable enough to accept a new normal and eventually wean us off of
normality altogether.”
. I qualify my claim here only because I do not doubt that there were and are moments in
which Dolezal might lean into white sensibilities or be subject to the allure of whiteness.
But this is not to damn her to an eternal life of “being white,” because we all are capable
of having those moments, even if we “are” black. Thus, in the way I am qualifying
Dolezal’s refutation of whiteness I would do the same for, say, the ways that someone
like Michael Eric Dyson or Cornel West—or better, your average (black) Joe—would be
susceptible to whiteness’s allure.
. Though funny—I laughed when I read it on my newsfeed—this is rather inaccurate sim-
ply looking at Dolezal’s case. To continue the metaphor: she was doing the dishes—for
ten years. And she would have kept doing them, indeed is still doing them, presumably
for the rest of her life, never opting out of the struggle that is being read as a black
woman, had her parents not, you could say, bought her a dishwasher and a house-
keeper. We only know that Dolezal was “born white” because others have deemed her
so, and likely, like almost every person she interacted with for that decade, would have
read and interacted with her as a black woman.
Marquis Bey 2350
. Alim, in his chapter “‘Who’s Afraid of the Transracial Subject?’ Raciolinguistics and the
Political Project of Transracialization,” writes that “I am interested in transracialization
as a political project performed by those whose racial enactments and commitments
challenge racial hierarchies” ().
. In addition to the þ signatories of the “Open Letter to Hypatia,” there is also charac-
teristic among detractors Kat Blaque, Morgan Jerkins, Tressie McMillan Cottom (),
Justin Charity, Denene Millner, Meredith Talusan, Lisa Marie Rollins, Rebecca Carroll,
and Kimberly McKee et al. And there are thousands of others on Twitter and Facebook,
in barber shops and hair salons, in homes and on the streets. I want to point to two
characteristic arguments, one by Kat Blaque and the other by Morgan Jerkins. The first
I’ve argued against elsewhere, which I replicate here: “Kat Blaque, a Black trans woman,
calls Dolezal out for her ‘fake “transracial” identity’ and avers that transgender is ‘noth-
ing like’ being transracial. Blaque grounds the differentiation between gender and race
in biology, noting that ‘gender is not a biological trait passed from parent to child,
whereas race is.’ Gender does not hold the same biological basis as race, she claims,”
and thus gives, implicitly, “biology” the last say in truthfulness, a kind of last word on
that which is really true, which may in fact be read as transphobic insofar as much of
trans studies seeks to combat the hold biology has over determining “fact” and “truth.” I
go on to argue,
She [Blaque] claims, “this idea of transitioning into a race, is something that’s only
available to certain people.” But, one must ask which people? Does this mean that
these people cannot be the transitioned race? Has there not been a history of, largely
Black women, bleaching their skin to become lighter and white? Do not some Black
people have features designated as “white” (aquiline noses, straight hair, etc.)? In
short, why does the ability to shift one’s race invalidate the multiplicity of their racial
identity? But, Blaque insists:
Rachel Dolezal, got a tan and a perm. . .The difference is, that, while my
gender has changed, my race will always remain the same. She can go
home and wash off her self-tanner, and wash out her perm. I can’t wash
off my gender, and that’s something that isn’t defined by my makeup
—this can be countered with Judith Butler’s demystification of performativity as

opposed to a performance. It is vital to clarify this distinction, thus we quote at length:
The bad reading [of Gender Trouble] goes something like this: I can get
up in the morning, look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to
be today. I can take out a piece of clothing and change my gender: stylize
it, and then that evening I can change it again and be something radically
other, so that what you get is something like the commodification of gen-
der, and the understanding of taking on a gender as a kind of consumer-
ism . . . When my whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the
very formation of persons, presupposes gender in a certain way—that gen-

der is not to be chosen and that “performativity” is not radical choice and
it’s not voluntarism. I just finished writing another manuscript in which I
spend page after page trying to refute the reduction of gender perform-
ance to something like style. Performativity has to do with repetition, very
often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force
them to resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the
trap that one is inevitably in. (Bey and Sakellarides , , ; see also
Butler and Kotz , )
The second, Jerkins, writes: “Dolezal, on the other hand, managed to embody whiteness,
white womanhood, in the guise of black womanhood. Only a white woman could pose
as a black woman and not be immediately laughed out of town. . . . Although Dolezal
darkened her skin, she still inhabits a white female body and, as such, possesses the
privilege to take black female characteristics and subsequently become a newsworthy
subject. While actual black women are stigmatized for the bodies that we live in, when
Rachel Dolezal attempts to wear our bodies as a kind of costume, she becomes intellec-
tualized. Only a white woman could inspire others to discuss if races can be switched,
and when someone like Rachel Dolezal does so, she is protected, even defended”
(Jerkins 2018, 46–47). First, there is a muted biological determinism and essentialism
happening in Jerkins’s remarks. How does one still inhabit a white female body when
that body, by numerous accounts, was not read or understood as white? Too, on what
grounds is the assertion made that Dolezal still inhabits a white female body when the
expression of that body, which is also to say the social legibility, is not “white”? Here
Jerkins, unfortunately, is echoing the transantagonism of Grosz and others, assuming
that one is condemned to a biological, natal, immutable physiognomy and thus social
meaning. Jerkins might very well conclude, along the same lines of logic, that trans
women still inhabit male bodies. Additionally, it is only of rhetorical weight that Jerkins
can say that actual black women are stigmatized while Dolezal is not, which marks the
consequential difference between Dolezal and “real” black women. Indeed, the claim
seems baseless: not only does she not know if or to what extent Dolezal was stigmatized
for her racial and gender expression and identification, Dolezal’s “lived experiences” as
someone read as a black woman, no doubt by many people, almost certainly led her to
multiple moments of being and feeling stigmatized. Last, it is not only a white woman
who could inspire people to discuss whether races can be switched—there is a substan-
tial archive of passing narratives and racial ambiguity stories, many of which concerned
black women, that have inspired books and articles and discourses on the subject of
racial “switching.”
. I understand, too, that there is a particular way that, though I maintain the aforemen-
tioned are all “passing” for black, there are some who pass as “authentic” and others
who pass as passing. In other words, there are perceived degrees of passing, making
some people’s passing appear as less, if you will, “passy” than others, less worked at
Marquis Bey 2370
than others, implying a kind of “realness” by virtue of how much less effort they are
thought to be exerting in their passing.
. Dolezal quotes Melissa Harris-Perry’s now-cancelled show:
“Is it possible that she might actually be Black?” she asked in a discussion about
me with the author Allyson Hobbs on her June  show. “The best way I know how
to describe this—and I want to be very careful here because I don’t want to say it’s
equivalent to the transgender experience but there’s a useful language in trans and
cis, which is just to say that some of us are born cisgender and some of us are born
transgendered [sic]—but I’m wondering can it be that we can be cisBlack and
transBlack, that there’s actually a different category of Blackness that is about the
achievement of Blackness despite one’s parentage?” ()
I want to argue, partially at least, that this “different category” of blackness is blackness,
a blackness-as-trans, which is to say a blackness that transes and exists incorporeally
and transgressively. Harris-Perry thinks Dolezal’s blackness as an openness and a thing
that happens and does rather than is had and gets done to.
. On the transphobic side of things, Green notes how many black people say, very tongue
in cheek, “Well, if we have to accept Caitlyn [Jenner], we need to accept Rachel
[Dolezal].” And they know very well that they don’t want to, and won’t, accept Dolezal.
So, because the sentence’s logic functions by making the clauses equivalent in value, to
not accept Dolezal means also that one ought not to accept Jenner’s transness, a trans-
phobic statement.
Green also shares that when they were at a parade marching under the banner of
“Black, Gay, and Here to Stay,” another black person said to them, “You have a choice; I
don’t.” After sitting with that, Green thinks, “So, are you saying that if you had a choice,
you’d choose not to be black? What does that say about how you feel and think about
your blackness?” (alwaysalreadypodcast 2017). It says that that person was, and maybe
still is, antiblack.
. See Bettcher a. Bettcher writes, drawing from her previous book chapter, “Trans
women and the meaning of ‘woman,’” “Instead of attempting to justify trans self-identity
claims. . .such claims ought to be accepted as presumptively valid as a starting-point of
trans theory and politics.”
. All references to the text will be indicated by paginated parentheticals.
. “Othermothering” is a concept that Patricia Hill-Collins (, ) defines as “women
who assist blood-mothers by sharing mothering responsibilities,” which describes the
black woman that assisted, if you will, Martin’s absent mother by bearing the responsi-
bility for his subjective (racial) formation.
. She goes on to define each of these nodes of reality enforcement:
Identity invalidation is the erasure of a trans person’s gender identity through an

opposing categorization (e.g., a trans person sees herself as a woman, but she is
categorized as a man). This invalidation is framed in terms of the appearance-real-

ity contrast (e.g., a trans woman may be represented as “really a man disguised as
a woman”). And this contrast is manifested in one of two ways that constitute a
double-bind for trans people—namely, passing as nontrans (and hence running
the risk of exposure as a deceiver) or else being openly trans (and consequently
being relegated to a mere pretender). Genital verification can be a literal exposure
(as with Brandon Teena, Gwen Araujo, and Angie Zapata) or else a discursive
reveal through euphemistic comments like “was discovered to be anatomically
male.” These disclosures anchor identity invalidation in the notion of genitalia as a
kind of concealed reality.
Parallels can be made here, but not analogies necessarily, with “passing” for black: the
invalidation of a claim to black identity, the seeming contrast or contradiction between
appearance (“looking black”) and “reality” (“actually being white”), the belief that if one
is “pretending” to be black then they are invariably attempting to deceive others in
some way, and the need to find evidentiary facts or truth to verify that one is “really”
black.
. Slow it down: yes, Martin was shot as a kid. Accidentally. “Walking home from school,”
he says, a “Guy opened up on his girlfriend right across the sidewalk, in broad daylight;
killed her, her new boyfriend, I guess he was, and Dwayne Pierce. Dwayne was in third
grade with me. I got caught with a ricochet. My leg was a bloody mess” (). In this
moment, too, he further redacts his familial parentage, imagining that the black police
officer who carried him and drove him to the hospital was his father: “I fell asleep and
dreamed my father was carrying me. My real father, not the one back at home. I
dreamed up a black man to be my father, right then and there. Tall. Kept his hair in a
close Afro. People called him Eight Ball” (–).
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University of Minnesota Press.
Marquis Bey 2410
8 8 8
MARQUIS BEY is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and
English at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Bey’s work concerns
black feminist theorizing, transgender studies, critical theory, and contem-
porary African American literature. Bey is the author of Them Goon Rules:
Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism (University of Arizona Press, )
and Anarcho-Blackness: Notes toward a Black Anarchism (AK Press, ) as
well as the forthcoming monograph Black Trans Feminism (Duke University
Press).

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Incorporeal Blackness: A Theorization in Two Parts—Rachel

Dolezal and Your Face in Mine

Published by Michigan State University Press

For additional information about this article

Indeed, the concept of Blackness as located in the body cannot be sustained

The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable

FICTIONS ARE COMPILATIONS OF FASHIONED INVENTIONS, NARRATIVES WOVEN AROUND

the aim of coherence. Racial categorizations, by which I mean the histories,

THE “DOLEZAL ‘AFFAIR’”

yet supporting Caitlyn Jenner’s transgender identiﬁcation. How, they asked, is

Dolezal can be rightly said to have refused whiteness via an intentional

We must be clear that this conversation concerns her blackness, not

Johnson , ). Prevailing deﬁnitions and classiﬁcations of social legibil-

detractors of Dolezal’s enactment of blackness—who are numerous, aca-

one’s own self-identiﬁcation—which always matters, no matter how much

“advocate[s] for the intelligibility of (un)becoming other”—that undone and

YOUR FACE IN MINE AND ASSUMING RACIAL IDENTITY

In other words, passing confounds our visually privileging cultural logic. It

After some expectedly shocking conversations, Kelly learns that Martin

The racist and minstrel-allusive imagery (the “Smiling Darky” caricature is

“move[s] to ﬁx the meaning of expressions like ‘woman,’ ‘trans,’ ‘person of

(to echo the affair of Dolezal’s blackness) without evidentiary basis—or by

Martin wants to in many ways supplant. Even he succumbed to it when he

Martin is interested in the anteorigin of blackness, the blackness of before

criteria bestowed to become legible to ontologics that are ultimately unable

We might argue here that, in conversation with Calvin Warren and

duration. . .a horizon of time that eludes objectiﬁcation, foreclosing idioms

grammatical dictates. Alan’s life neither stopped nor alluded to a continua-

Existing ontologies of blackness capture it in the epidermis by way of think-

seduction? Both Dolezal and Wilkinson externalize the anarchic multiplicity,

—this can be countered with Judith Butler’s demystiﬁcation of performativity as

very formation of persons, presupposes gender in a certain way—that gen-

Identity invalidation is the erasure of a trans person’s gender identity through an

categorized as a man). This invalidation is framed in terms of the appearance-real-

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