This time it’s different.

If there’s one thing more disconcerting than Republicans opposing Barack Obama at every turn, it’s the rare occasion when they actually agree with him. True, the gridlock resulting from their dysfunctional obstinacy is unproductive. But there is something comically reassuring about the predictability of their childlike tantrums. If Obama said Rachel Dolezal was white, the GOP would swear blind she is black.

“Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear,” wrote Walter White, the former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in 1947. “Men and women who have decided that they will be happier and more successful if they flee from the proscription and humiliation which the American colour line imposes on them.”

On the evening of 20 September 1996, Bill Clinton returned to the White House from a brief presidential campaign swing. Shortly before 1am the following morning, without ceremony or publicity and with a certain degree of sheepishness, he signed the Defence of Marriage Act. For the next 17 years the act, which defined marriage exclusively as the union of one man and one woman, was federal law. As a result, even when individual states started legalising same-sex marriage years later, gay couples could not file their federal taxes jointly and federal civilian employees could not take unpaid leave to care for a sick partner or enjoy equal family health and pension benefits.

In her biography of Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston, Valerie Boyd explains why it was so difficult to track Hurston’s whereabouts during the novelist’s early twenties. “In 1911 it was relatively easy for someone, particularly a black woman, to evade history’s recording gaze,” wrote Boyd in Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. “If not legally linked to a man, as daughter or wife, black women did not count in some ways – at least to the people who did the official counting.”