RACHEL Dolezal didn't have to do it.

The former president of the Spokane National Association For The Advancement Of Colored People (NCAAP) didn't have to "identify as" black to show solidarity with the people she empathised with. She could have been the transparently white person with German and Czech roots that her parents revealed her to be, and still done that. She could even have done that while wearing fake tan and weaving her hair. And she could, of course, have involved herself in the same campaigns and organisations as a white woman in love with black culture, a "wigger", and been embraced. But for some reason she felt the need to be black. Given her complex family background - brought up in a multi-racial family among adopted black siblings - there have been plenty of theories over the last week about that, and I won't go into them, save to say her claim to blackness doesn't seem to be straightforward opportunism.

It's tragic, given Dolezal's own concerns about racism, that she hasn't been able to see the thread of racism in her own behaviour. Particularly given her brother's claim that around the time she started to change her physical appearance: "She used to tell Izaiah [her adopted brother] ... that all white people are racists. She might have developed some self-hatred."

One of the reasons many people have got upset about the Dolezal story is that comparisons have been made with trans woman and heroine-of-the-moment Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce Jenner, step-dad of the Kardashian family. It had seemed, when Jenner came out, that the USA had made a big leap towards embracing the idea that you were what you felt your truth to be. If your truth was woman, then that was what you were. Then, along came Dolezal, exposed as being white, yet saying black was her "truth", and people started describing her as trans-black. In a way it seemed a testing ground for how far we will go in recognising that what you are was how you felt. And in Dolezal's case people seemed to be saying this was as step too far. Mostly, though, they were saying this because they did not find Dolezal authentic.

But some people simply objected to the comparison - saying that race and gender were too different. Actually I don't think they are. Clearly there are similarities between race, or at least ethnicity, and gender, since they are both social-bio-historical constructions, both formed out of a mesh of biology and culture.

Of course, how we react emotionally to Dolezal's story is very different from how we react to Jenner's, since it seems to be mostly about the revelation of a deception. Many see Dolezal as a lie, and Jenner as truth. But actually that's partly because of the nature of their individual stories and the point at which we come to them. Jenner arrives telling us she has found her truth, but Dolezal enters the public eye at a point when she is revealed to be not what she presents as. Maybe if we'd met her earlier, known her at some point when she was coming out as being black, we might have been more sympathetic. But as it is, her apparent erasure of her white history rankles - particularly, because we know that actually a great many of the privileges of whiteness still linger around her.

On one level Dolezal's story seems to me to be over-hyped. We're hearing about it because it's such a rare case as to be sensational. And being so uncommon, it tells us little about the more important stories or questions around racism both in the United States and here: questions, for instance, around the shocking footage that surfaced recently of a police officer in Texas forcing a teenage girl to the ground, or around why a white gunman last week went into a black church in Charleston and shot down the people gathered there. As the theologian Broderick Greer tweeted, "only a white person could get this much attention for being black".

It seems to me that Dolezal is a red herring, only in the spotlight because we are so obsessed with identity politics. She is an extreme reminder of a wider phenomenon. We seem to be developing a politics that centres around who you are and how you feel far more than what you do or what your values are. So many people now are so wrapped up in themselves and in their own stories, or even the vicariously-experienced stories of others, that they forget principles. We forget that it's not mere empathy that changes the world. We forget that you do not have to be or become the oppressed group in order to fight for them. We forget that this is not about who you are but how you think and act. We forget that the inequality that is endemic in our society reaches far beyond race and gender. That's not saying we white people shouldn't check our privilege, or assume some guilt. But that, whoever we are or believe ourselves to be, whatever colour or gender, there are other truths which are much bigger than our own personal truths.