by WorldTribune Staff, February 27, 2017
The white woman who passed herself off as black – and even became head of an NAACP branch – says she is now jobless, broke and on the verge of homelessness.
And Rachel Dolezal still insists she is not white.
“I do think a more complex label would be helpful, but we don’t really have that vocabulary,” Dolezal told The Guardian. “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 … Calling myself black feels more accurate than saying I’m white.”
When her story went viral in June 2015, photos of a younger, white-skinned and blonde Dolezal soon surfaced. The former leader of the Spokane NAACP chapter and a university professor, Dolezal also once sued historically black Howard University for racial discrimination, because she was white.
Since then, the 39-year-old Dolezal said she’s only been offered jobs in reality television and porn. She says she’s been turned down for 100 jobs and her memoir was rejected by 30 publishers before finding a taker.
Dolezal reportedly is also ruffling feathers in the transgender community by claiming that race, like gender, is fluid.
“It’s more so,” Dolezal told The Guardian. “Because it wasn’t even biological to begin with. It was always a social construct.”
Dolezal said she’s never considered identifying as white again.
“I feel that I was born with the essential essence of who I am, whether it matches my anatomy and complexion or not,” Dolezal said. “I’ve never questioned being a girl or a woman, for example, but whiteness has always felt foreign to me, for as long as I can remember. I didn’t choose to feel this way or be this way, I just am.
“What other choice is there than to be exactly who we are?”