Reacting to Rachel Dolezal’s interview with MSNBC during which the former Spokane NAACP president claimed to identify as black, CNN discussed the merits of such a statement. On Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield, Charles Blow of the New York Times and cultural critic Michaela Angela Davis dismissed the idea that Dolezal could identify as black on the basis of white privilege.
Davis asserted that Dolezal’s choice to identify as black has no scientific basis, unlike transgenderism, which apparently is reliable when it comes to biological science. She explained:
[W]e're actually entertaining transracial outside of the adoptive space, you know, where it's used as a thing. No case study, no science, nothing to support it. There's not decades of research like with transgender people, particularly transgender black women. This, this, you know, as I said earlier, this is white privilege at a spectacular level. This could not happen the other way around.