"American history is full of tales of partly black people 'passing' as white, trying to shed the burdens of an oppressed people, but doing the reverse is much rarer."

"... Faking a racial history, in either direction, raises difficult questions about what race is and why it matters, and about the assumptions people make.... 'There was very little to be gained by identifying yourself as black, so if you did, no one questioned it,' said Ms. Sandweiss, author of 'Passing Strange,' an acclaimed book about a man who did just that in the late 19th century. 'It shows how absurd racial classifications often are.' There have been other examples of white people living as black, in American history and culture, but not many. When with his black wife and children, Clarence King, the subject of Ms. Sandweiss’s book, pretended to be a black Pullman porter, while in his parallel life he was a famous white geologist and surveyor with powerful friends. Mezz Mezzrow, a jazz musician who died in 1972, often passed as black, called himself 'a voluntary Negro.'..."

From a NYT article titled "Black or White? Woman’s Story Stirs Up a Furor."

The article has this quote from a Guardian columnist named Steven W. Thrasher: "The reason that [Rachel Dolezal's] story is so fascinating to me and to the rest of the world is that it exposes in a disquieting way that our race is performance — that, despite the stark differences in how our races are perceived and privileged (or not) by others, they are all predicated on a myth that the differences are intrinsic and intrinsically perceptible."