Two days ago an email came from an Iraqi doctor in Baghdad in response to a brief greeting I sent for the month of Ramadan.

“Thanks so much for remembering us…In fact we are the same if not worse.  Our hearts are broken at the organized ruining of our country.  We are targeted by those criminals and gangs coming from everywhere, even from the west who are all witnessing this drama and, if not supporting it, are keeping silent.  We wonder what sin we committed to face this gloomy black fate.  In fact, what is going on is beyond words. “

This courageous woman doctor never left the side of gravely ill children despite the great exodus of doctors due to kidnappings, assassinations and threats to their lives and families.  Sadly she reports that another of her siblings has cancer, and she needs to leave the medical students for some days.  This happens she says regretfully in “the critical time of final exams.”   She herself is a cancer survivor and both her mother and sister had cancer.   They have no choice, she says, but to go on and try to survive.

What’s your race?

Most of the discussion around the revelation that Rachel Dolezal, who resigned this week under pressure as head of the Spokane, Wash., NAACP, isn’t black, as she had claimed, and grew up as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white girl, seems to assume that this question is objective, uncomplicated and neutral. Come on, which is it? You’re either African-American, Caucasian or other. Check the box.

And when a question is objective, uncomplicated and neutral, the answer you give is either the truth or a lie. And Dolezal . . . gasp . . . lied. She darkened her skin. She braided her hair. She passed herself off as belonging to a race she did not, in fact, belong to. And because she passed in the “other” direction — from white to black — it’s national news. And she’s somewhere on the spectrum that runs from strange to crazy.