Hold on wait a minute. Y’all thought she was finished?
Last month, Rachel Dolezal was outed–by her parents, no less–as a Caucasian woman, after approximately a decade of pretending to be Black. She almost immediately resigned from her position as the President of the Spokane Chapter of the NAACP.
Since the days immediately following the initial reports, Ms. Dolezal has kept pretty quiet, her name only popping up in follow-up news reports or Sunday afternoon CNN debates pointing out the fact that she could’ve accomplished just as much as a NAACP prez had she remained true to her actual ethnicity.
That silence has ended, thanks to a new interview with Vanity Fair. (In case you’re wondering, the woman that interviewed Dolezal was Black). There are some pretty interesting soundbites, most notably, the not-so-surprising fact that Dolezal is continuing to identify not as an African-American woman, but a Black one.
I just feel like I didn’t mislead anybody; I didn’t deceive anybody. If people feel misled or deceived, then sorry that they feel that way, but I believe that’s more due to their definition and construct of race in their own minds than it is to my integrity or honesty, because I wouldn’t say I’m African American, but I would say I’m black, and there’s a difference in those terms.
Okay…
A little deeper into the interview however, there’s an even more interesting bit, concerning where Dolezal is finding her main source of income since, according to her, the last check she received was in June for less than $2000.
As she figures out where she’ll land next, Dolezal says she is surviving on one of the skills she perfected as she attempted to build a black identity. At Eastern Washington University, she lectured on the politics and history of black hair, and she says she developed a passion for taking care of and styling black hair while in college in Mississippi. That passion is now what brings in income in the home she shares with Franklin. She says she has appointments for braids and weaves about three times a week.
You just can’t make this stuff up. Check out the full profile over at Vanity Fair.
