Rachel Dolezal may have been born white, but the activist has been raised by an African American family.
Advertisement
“It’s not a costume”. “Everything I do is connected to other people, so I don’t know how to assess the damage other than within my own mind”.
Above, Rachel claims it (her race) isn’t something she can put on or take off anymore, which strikes me as the most tone-deaf, unaware thing she can possibly say. “I think the world might be-but I’m not”, Dolezal said.
If you choose to engage with Dolezal’s story, to wrap your head around the questions about race her mere presence prompts, know that you’re engaging with someone who’s living a unusual fiction that she’s written for and about herself.
Tyler Tjomsland/AP Dolezal (c.) smiles as she meets with Joseph M. King, of King’s Consulting (l.) and Scott Finnie, director and senior professor of Eastern Washington University’s Africana Education Program, in January.
Interestingly, Rachel Dolezal may not have categorically stated she was “black”. “And that’s simply not true”. The rest of us just need to catch up and stop “misunderstanding” her, she says.
“It’s taken my entire life to negotiate how to identify, and I’ve done a lot of research and a lot of studying”, Dolezal told the magazine.
Unfortunately for Dolezal, by the time her memoir goes to print, hundreds of videos of cats falling off of couches will have been posted to YouTube, thus thoroughly occupying the attention of the potential book-buying public.
“It’s hard to collapse it all into just a single statement about what is”. But even with all that, she doesn’t believe that she lied about her identity. Since being discovered as an actual white woman, Rachel had to leave her paid and unpaid positions in Spokane.
Still, Dolezal insists that her Black identity makes sense, that it was always inherently factual and that she is indeed a Black woman.
But the former educator isn’t done telling her story. She has claimed a race that she was not born into and that is misleading.
Dolezal grew up with a biological brother and four adopted siblings: three African American and one Haitian. As a result of her fall from false grace, she told Vanity Fair that she is now maintaining a steady income with one of her takeaways from her devout studies of Black culture by doing braids and weaves.
As for where her future takes her, she told Samuels that she would like to return to a life of racial activism, but feels that she won’t be able to do so until she had written a formal apologia.
Advertisement
Since the controversy, Dolezal has still been in touch with the NAACP members she used to lead.
