Former NAACP branch president Rachel Dolezal, who falsely claimed she’s black and still believes she did nothing wrong, is living on food stamps and expects to lose her home next month.
“I’m not going to stop and apologize and grovel and feel bad about it,” she said in an interview with the Guardian. “I would just be going back to when I was little, and had to be what everybody else told me I should be—to make them happy.”
Dolezal, who also used to be a professor, is currently struggling to find a job and is missing her rent payments. According to her, she applied for well over 100 jobs, but has received no offers, even from a supermarket. The only offers she received were in porn and reality TV. Her friend helped to pay the February rent, but it’s unlikely she’ll make the payment for the next month.
“I do think a more complex label would be helpful, but we don’t really have that vocabulary,” said the former Africana studies professor. “I feel like the idea of being trans-black would be much more accurate than ‘I’m white.’ Because you know, I’m not white.”
The “trans-black” woman made headlines in 2015 after her parents revealed she wasn’t actually black. She stepped down from her positions following the scandal and admitted she was “biologically born white to white parents” but insisted that race isn’t “coded in your DNA.”
“It wasn’t like the honest thing to do is say, ‘I’m white’, because race is a social construct,” said Dolezal to the paper. “And this gave me this great sense of internal freedom: I wasn’t actually all fucked up. I was actually on to something this whole time.”
To pretend being black, Dolezal regularly sunbathed, used traditionally black hairstyles, claimed her ethnicity as “black” on employment and medical documents, and responded to questions about her ethnicity with “mixed,” adding that her mother was white.
In the interview, she also detailed her childhood in Montana, claiming her Christian fundamentalist parents suppressed her creativity and allegedly beat her. She said she always drew herself as having curly hair and dark skin and sometimes covered herself with mud to pretend to have been kidnapped from Africa.
Following her parents’ adoption of black children, she started wearing braided hair and educated them on black history, and “began to see the world through black eyes.”
“On the white side I noticed hatred, fear and ignorance,” Dolezal told the Guardian, describing her experience at college. “And on the black side I noticed fear, anger and pain. I felt more at home with the anger and pain towards whites, because I had some anger and pain—toward not just my parents but also, even though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it then, towards white supremacy.”
She added that her memoir titled “In Full Color” is due out in March, was rejected by 30 publishing house before anyone agreed to print it.
“Right now the only place I feel understood and completely accepted is with my kids and my sister,” she said. “The narrative was that I’d offended both communities in an unforgivable way, so anybody who gave me a dime would be contributing to wrong and oppression and bad things. To a liar and fraud and a con.”
