But, crucially, Dolezal does explain what she thinks blackness entails, and what she thinks it means to be black. She talks about civil rights activism and black authors. She talks about hair. She does hair. She brags that none of her black clients dropped her in light of the scandal. Dolezal proudly mismanages her own haggard braids, which she clearly regards as a crucial set piece in her grotesque production of blackness. Dolezal talks about blackness as if it were reducible to two qualities, and only two qualities: scholarship and aesthetics. It cannot occur to her that blackness—a social construction, indeed—is a comprehensive and involuntary realm of experience. White power invented it, and white power enforces it, but, paradoxically, black people own blackness. Throughout the documentary, several black women tell Dolezal as much. Dolezal disputes their authority in the vaguest terms, but nonetheless assuredly. She has decided that she is black, so she’s black. Dolezal