Woman without a country

Thanks to abundant media coverage and non-stop Twitter/social media conversation, the strange case of Rachel Dolezal is internationally familiar.

By nature blond and peaches-and-cream complected, Spokane, Washington's Dolezal has for years misrepresented her identity, parentage, and past. She now claims to be black, teepee-born, a survivor of abuse, and the mother of her adopted black brother - assertions that baffle her recently interviewed white birth parents, who deny all.

Having reinvented herself, she became both an Africana studies professor at Eastern Washington University and the President of Spokane's NAACP chapter.

"I don't give two shits what you guys believe! You are so far done, and out of my life!" a belligerent, utterly caught-out Dolezal snapped today to a Sky interviewer. She huffed that her sole concern was clarifying the matter to the black community and her NAACP colleagues, not explaining it to "a community that I, quite frankly, don't think really understands the definitions of race and ethnicity."

That nose-in-air elitism, unfortunately, is not uncommon among psychologically-disheveled, unproductive academics.

To its roaring discredit, the NAACP voiced its support of the fundamentally dishonest Dolezal. That organization's sour allegiance should be remembered by anyone receiving future donation requests from it.

Note the hostility Dolezal expressed toward "you guys" who she considers "out of my life!" It was an extension of nasty racial separatist impulses she had for years cultivated.

Ruthanne Dolezal, Rachel's mother, told CNN on Friday that her daughter had in past years insisted her parents not attend her functions, lest they "blow her cover."

"Rachel has chosen to distance herself from the family and be hostile toward us," Ruthanne told the cable news network. "She doesn't want us to be where she is, she doesn't want to be seen with us because it ruins her image."

And still more fuel came from Rachel's brother, Ezra. Youngest adopted brother Izaiah lives with Rachel. In a Friday phone interview, Ezra told the Washington Post, "[Rachel] turned Isaiah kind of racist. Told Izaiah all this stuff about white people, made him really racist towards white people."

Race-hate, then, would seem to be a Rachel Dolezal faith. It is hardly a natural component of any ethnicity, but Dolezal is hardly a natural person.

Stepping back a bit, though, and considering this with a broad view, one realizes it is not without a particularly odd fellow.

Every decade or so (and this is wonderfully ironic) some obscure neo-Nazi half-wit is discovered to be of Jewish lineage. As a result, their entire crackpot and poisonous world crumbles. Counterfeit identity ended.

This is not to equate blackness and nazism; rather, the estimation points up the ludicrousness of artificiality, of denial-through-reinvention, and of attempting to pass as someone other than your true self.

That indicates a core unhappiness with one's very being, possible mental ill health, and is ultimately frail.