Callum Stracey-Steven

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Release date

April 27th, 2018

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It has nothing to do with director Lisa Brownson, or her co-writer Jeff Seymann Gilbert, who have made an even handed, riveting documentary, but watching The Rachel Divide (2018) can be exasperatingly frustrating. Was it ever going to be anything else when your focal point is Rachel Dolezal, a once prominent local chapter NAACP president and Africana studies instructor, who in June 2015 was infamously exposed for masquerading as a black woman. Alas, the indignation and frustration lies not with Rachel's central deception but rather the way her post-revelation willfulness on camera simultaneously explains her behaviour whilst thwarting any chance for a redemption story.

 

This is a great shame, especially as her complex and dishonest sense of victimhood needlessly overshadows genuinely awful early beginnings. We learn her backstory, where the young white girl from Vermont ultimately saves herself and her adopted black siblings from a strict and abusive religious upbringing. We see that her affinity for African culture speaks to her struggles and fuels her many artistic talents. 

 

Yet as Rachel doubles-down on double-think, the misguided indignation increases and everyone else is to blame. The contradictions are frustratingly self-evident for the viewer. Whether it’s claiming most media interview requests are denied because she cannot 'trust their intentions' or lamenting the toll the scandal has taken on her family yet seeming all too eager to drag her sons into the spectacle. Rachel Dolezal truly is the embodiment of a post truth world, a place where the distinction between fact and fiction is blurred and nothing can really be trusted. 

 

Fraudulent behaviour, like all fantasies, is indicative of trying to avoid reality. The Rachel Divide draws attention to many things but is most absorbing when showing its central figure’s helter-skelter pathology and naive comprehension of race relations. Ironically, Rachel’s flights of fancy unwittingly detract from the very societal failings she spent her adult life trying to highlight.

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