Netflix reveals Dolezal documentary

By now, the name Rachel Dolezal is familiar to most everyone in Spokane, if not the entire country. She’s the woman, born of white parents, who identifies as black.

As such, Doezal — who legally changed her name in 2017 to Nkechi Amare Diallo — sits at the heart of a controversy concerning what some have called racial appropriation but what she takes pains to explain in her autobiography “In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World.” Here are some quotes from that very book:

“For me, Blackness is more than a set of racialized physical features. It involves acknowledging our common human ancestry with roots in Africa.”

“Just as a transgender person might be born male but identify as female, I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t but expressing something I already was. I wasn’t passing as Black; I was Black, and there was no going back.”

“I felt less like I was adopting a new identity and more like I was unveiling one that had been there all along. Finally able to embrace my true self, I allowed the little girl I’d colored with a brown crayon so long ago to emerge.”

If you aren’t inclined to buy the book, you might want to watch the Netflix documentary “The Rachel Divide,” which was directed and co-written (with Jeff Seymann Gilbert) by Laura Brownson. It’s actually a fascinating view, revealing aspects of Dolezal’s story that I, for one, had not been previously aware of — mostly involving charges of abused directed at her birth parents.

But other than prompting sympathy for her two sons, neither of whom seems happy at being caught up in the overall controversy, it’s not likely to change anyone’s mind.

Instead, “The Rachel Divide” works hard to give an insider’s view of a story that for some is the case of a woman suffering from a serious sense of cultural displacement and for others is an ongoing attempt to redefine notions of race and what that term actually means.