Current Events –
Rachel Dolezal: “I’m A Black Woman”

Rachel Dolezal, the former Spokane, WA NAACP president who claimed to be black but was really white, has broken her silence and is finally speaking out about her ethnic switcheroo.

Current Events
After duping the public for years with her tanned skin, coarse hair and even a photograph of a black man she said was her father (he was not), Dolezal’s real parents, who are white, eventually had enough of the charade and outed her.

When asked recently how she felt about having her cover blown, Dolezal insisted she wasn’t pretending and is still unapologetically claiming she is in fact a black woman.

“It’s not a costume,” Dolezal said. “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.”

Dolezal spent countless years researching and perfecting her black identity. She submerged herself in African-American literature and the history of the Civil Rights movement. She attended graduate school at the historically black Howard University, where she unsuccessfully sued for being discriminated against because she was white. She is an expert in black hair care and fashion and has made clear she has no plans on altering the way she presents herself anytime soon.

“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 said. “I could have a long conversation, an academic conversation about that. I don’t know. 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.”

Current Events
It’s an incredibly odd defense — playing a game of racial semantics — yet Dolezal has chosen her story and is sticking to it.

“It’s hard to collapse it all into just a single statement about what is,” Dolezal said. “You can’t just say in one sentence what is blackness or what is black culture or what makes you who you are.”

Despite doing so much advance work to successfully morph into a black woman, Dolezal seems to have never considered the endgame. She never considered the consequences of getting caught, or of her story becoming global news and her name a punchline.

“[I lost] friends and the jobs and the work and—oh, my God—so much at the same time,” Dolezal said.

Somehow, Dolezal has convinced herself that everything was all a big misunderstanding and that she is, herself, unclear on exactly what was misunderstood.  So, let’s look at the facts:  Dolezal said she was a black woman when she was not. Dolezal also showcased Albert Wilkerson Jr., a black man she met in Idaho, as her father, when he was not. Despite her outright lies, Dolezal says the only problem was one of timing.  She feels had she been able to explain her complicated childhood and sincere, long-time love for black culture to everyone before it publicly blew up, everyone would have understood and all would have been forgiven.

“Again, I wish I could have had conversations with all kinds of people,” she said. “If I would have known this was going to happen, I could have said, ‘O.K., so this is the case. This is who I am, and I’m black and this is why.’”  Hmmm…

Can anyone spell D-E-L-U-S-I-O-N-A-L, since Rachel Dolezal clearly can not?

OK WASSUP! covers current events.  Today’s article:
Rachel Dolezal continues to claim ‘I am a Black woman!’