What is this story really about? Take your pick. Hair color, hair style, skin color? Race? Whose race? Maybe it’s about boxes, and checking the right ones. Maybe it’s about integrity, lies, and deception.

Two weeks ago, I had never heard of Rachel Dolezal, the woman who recently stepped down from her post as executive director of Spokane’s NAACP amid a swirl of media controversy regarding her race.

I have several confessions of my own to make about this story. First, I’m coming to despise “the media,” whose main function these days seems to be public bullying. Second, I admit that my viewpoint might be atypical, in that the more I learn about Rachel, the better I like her. And finally, I have begun to realize that I too am partly African-American, and that you probably are as well.

In case you have been living in a cave recently (and if you have, congratulations — you’ve probably made a wise choice), I will give you a little background information. Rachel was raised in a family alongside four adopted black siblings. Her parents — whose reliability has been portrayed as unimpeachable so far by our national media — have said that Rachel was blond and fair-skinned as a child, and that she is of mostly German and Czech ancestry, with a trace of Native American heritage.

Rachel spent some of her childhood in Mississippi in mainly black schools, and some of it home-schooled with her family in Montana. By her account as well as her parents’, she came to identify with black children and black culture at an early age. She married a black man, has one son from that marriage, and has legally adopted one of her former adoptive black siblings. She also attended historically black Howard University.

Given her life history, it is small wonder to me that Rachel came to “self-identify” as black. She learned about hair-styling, and she chose to style her own with an Afro look.

I guess this is one of the things “the media” wants us to be outraged about. Somewhere in the Ten Commandments, there must have been a “Thou shalt not change thy hair style or hair color,” but maybe Moses missed that one.

Along the course of her life, people began to make assumptions about Rachel, based on her looks, her family, and her lifestyle, and she did not correct them. Maybe she even misled them, by checking the “wrong” boxes. Did she self-identify as “Black” or “African-American” when she filled in job applications?

I’ve never liked having to decide which of those boxes to check. There’s usually one for “Native-American,” and I think I ought to qualify there, since I was born in the USA, but I know that’s not what the designation means. I hate checking “White,” because I’m really two-toned, with tanned arms and face, and the rest of me peach-colored. They have no boxes for “Irish” or “Greek,” which is my heritage. And the box for “Caucasian” makes me cringe, especially now that I have checked the definition on Wikipedia.

If you look up that definition, you will find largely discredited archetypes that sound uncomfortably like the foundation of “Mein Kampf.” There is even a graph from a book published in 1920, entitled “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.” And it turns out that being Caucasian actually includes being from Africa as one of its many subsets.

Knowing that one of my grandfathers was born on the island of Crete, I have no problem accepting that my naturally tanning skin probably dates back to some African ancestry. And if you believe in evolution, you too should accept that if you could trace your own roots back far enough, you probably have African bloodlines as well.

So has Rachel been lying to us? I’ll say this: she never lied to me, and I wish her the best in life, which seems to be more than her parents do.

One of Rachel’s sons reassured her this way. “Mom,” he said, “Racially, you’re human. Culturally, you’re black.”

Well said. And I recommend that we all start being more honest with ourselves about our own very mixed racial heritages.

John McColgan writes from his home in Joseph.