The New Dark Age of the Fake Self

Buffy Sainte-Marie

News broke last week that multiple award-winning folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie isn’t Native American, as she’s claimed for sixty years. Since breaking into the Greenwich Village folk scene alongside Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, Sainte-Marie’s public persona has included her putative claim of Canadian birth, to the Piapot band of the Cree nation; she was subsequently, she said, adopted by a Massachusetts couple. New documents claim she was born White, to an Anglo-Italian family outside Boston.

Sainte-Marie’s public career has focused heavily on breaking boundaries for generations. She was supposedly the first Native American to win an Oscar, and has won Grammy and Juno awards for Indigenous music categories. If the current accusations stand, that means she received accolades intended for legitimately marginalized persons. It means she’s participated in expropriating other groups’ stories, reselling them at a profit, and claiming the honors accruing thereunto. It makes her, morally, a common thief.

This is especially vexing in the music industry, where we expect professionals to speak from experience. “Authenticity” is the watchword among pop singers, poets, and dramatists. Nobody expects this of, say, actors; when Gillian Anderson played Margaret Thatcher on The Crown, nobody bellyached because she wasn’t really a Prime Minister. But whenever Kid Rock rehashes his “plain folks” redneck persona, somebody hastily reminds us that he grew up rich in Michigan, just cosplaying working-class roots.

Recently, the internet’s population of full-time professional offense-takers has become particularly militant around policing racial boundaries. Rachel Dolezal set the pattern eight years ago, but she’s gotten lost amidst the tide. More recently, netizens have pushed themselves into a tizzy about whether BLM firebrand Shaun King might be secretly White, or that MAGA glamour queen Kari Lake might be concealing Black parentage. Whatever the truth, we clearly expect politicians, like pop stars, to be authentic.

Yours truly, right, as an angel (there’s a stretch) withJeff Ensz, left, as George Bailey
in the 2017 Kearney Community theatre production of It's a Wonderful Life

The demand for authenticity sometimes produces strange effects. Actor Jussie Smollett’s case is almost comically extreme, but representative. Being both Black and gay, Smollett evidently believed he needed some categorical oppression in his backstory; but he comes from a middle-class background and a relatively low-friction life. So he paid two brothers to fabricate a hate crime. While most participants in the “oppression Olympics” don’t go nearly so far, lies and street theatre are depressingly common.

But simultaneously, I fear that “authenticity” creates siloes that restrict our ability to participate in culture creation. As a trained actor myself, I can’t entirely manufacture my stage identity. I can’t, for instance, use blackface. Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder will probably be the last mainstream actor in my lifetime to use blackface on camera. Even then, he played a satire, a character too lacking in self-awareness to realize the harm in his actions.

I have, however, played characters dissimilar to myself. Onstage, I’ve been Jewish, gay, a veteran, and dead—none of which I’ve ever been offstage. I’ve affected Southern, Bostonian, Yiddish, and British accents. Okay, I’ve never discolored my skin to affect another racial identity, but I’ve adopted other external signs of groups I don’t belong to. Exactly how far from my “authentic” identity can I stray before I stop being an actor, and become something harmful?

A friend suggested Buffy Sainte-Marie could take a 23andMe test to determine her genetic quotient. Laying aside that she’s already done so, and found nothing, this testifies to the prevalence of pseudoscience in racial debates. As Richard J. Perry notes, these tests promise results they can’t possibly deliver. They only identify genetic markers existing in statistically significant concentrations in certain geographic areas. Race isn’t genetic, it’s social; did anyone treat Sainte-Marie as Indigenous growing up?

Please don’t misunderstand. I recognize why it’s important for public figures to not misrepresent themselves when speaking for their (putative) heritage. To quote one egregious example, political operative and notorious bigot Asa Earl Carter fled Alabama, moved west, and rechristened himself as Cherokee Forrest Carter. His fictional memoir The Education of Little Tree has actively preserved harmful stereotypes about Native Americans. Jamake Highwater and Hyemeyohsts Storm have similarly falsified their heritage and kept stereotypes alive.

However, ours is a time of shifting standards; formerly acceptable modes of imitation have become verboten, and the new boundaries haven’t solidified. While Buffy Sainte-Marie has her defenders, most reasonable people will agree she crossed a line, pretending to be something she isn’t. But most artists pretend, at least occasionally, and some forms of pretend are more acceptable than others. Some of us will certainly choose wrong; others will choose correctly, but be judged later.