It was just over a month ago when Rachel Dolezal burst into the national spotlight as the white woman who pretended to be black and became an NAACP president. But now, nearly 40 days later, Dolezal, who no longer works at the Spokane chapter of the African-American organization, still maintains that she is black.
In a piece for Vanity Fair, the racially confused social justice warrior doubled — tripled, quadrupled — down on her identity:
It’s not a costume. I don’t know spiritually and metaphysically how this goes, but I do know that from my earliest memories I have awareness and connection with the black experience, and that’s never left me. It’s not something that I can put on and take off anymore. Like I said, I’ve had my years of confusion and wondering who I really [was] and why and how do I live my life and make sense of it all, but I’m not confused about that any longer. I think the world might be—but I’m not.
Besides sticking to this otherwise unscientific claim, Dolezal said it’s not her fault that America was offended by her lies, but their own.
“I just feel like I didn’t mislead anybody,” she said. “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.”
She then stumbles through an admission that while she wouldn’t say she is African-American, she is black because “there’s a difference in those terms.” (She “backed that up” by saying one time during a traffic stop, an officer marked her race as “black.” See?)
For now, Dolezal, who is out of a job and trying to support her 13-year-old son, is hoping to return to her social justice advocacy and is paving the way by planning to write a book to explain her blackness, once and for all.
“After that comes out, then I’ll feel a little bit more free to reveal my life in the racial social-justice movement,” she said. “I’m looking for the quickest way back to that, but I don’t feel like I am probably going to be able to re-enter that work with the type of leadership required to make change if I don’t have something like a published explanation.”
In the meantime, she is accepting appointments to do black hair.
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