Being Who I Really Am: Performing Blackness in the Lives of Johnny Otis and Rachel Dolezal

Johnny Otis was a famous bandleader whose career bridged the period from the late Big Band era through the rise of Rhythm and Blues and on into Soul Music. He is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Blues Hall of Fame, and the Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame, for his achievements as a musician and his advocacy for and mentorship of Black musicians like Jackie Wilson and Big Mama Thornton. He grew up in Black neighborhoods of Berkeley and Oakland, California. His wife and children were Black. All of the people in his band were Black. He was revered as a Black musician, impresario, and mentor to Black musicians. And he was free in his description of his racial identity as “Black by persuasion.”

Rachel Dolezal was the child of a rural White family in northwest Montana whose parents adopted four Black babies in her teenage years. In acting as junior mother to them, and successively in participating in Black student organizations in a college in Mississippi, attending Howard University, then having two children of her own with Black men, teaching Black art and history to college students, becoming de facto mother to two of her Black siblings, and immersing herself in the Black civil rights struggle, she took on what was in her mind an identity as a Black woman. Some people outside her immediate circle did not see her that way.

This paper assays the Black racial performances in the careers of these two individuals and endeavors to explain the very different results they achieved in their respective attempts at racial shape shifting.