Rachel Dolezal unemployed, on food stamps and soon to be homeless? A former NAACP head does the public relations rounds with her forthcoming memoir release, In Full Color.
It seems Rachel Dolezal the white woman who for years passed herself off as African American and rose to become the head of an NAACP is bona fide living the adversity that afflicts many African Americans; abject poverty.
In an interview with the guardian, Dolezal who unequivocally identifies herself as black despite the fact she was born white and had passed herself off as black in a bid to rise up the educational ranks, having becoming a professor at, now finds herself jobless, on food stamps and soon to be homeless.
The sobering tell all comes despite the former educator still insisting she is not white. Which opens the question, if one can appropriate their sexuality, their religion, gender can one also appropriate their racial identity? Or as Dolezal has always maintained, racial identity doesn’t have to be what color one’s skin is born with but rather how they relate culturally to their environment.
Either way, the educator’s views have failed to resonate with many potential employers, with Dolezal conceding she has sent out her resume to more than 100 employers and has yet to have received an offer.
Dolezal went so far as to legally change her name, but people still recognize and mock her.
The only jobs she’s been offered have come in reality television and adult entertainment. Indeed.
According to Dolezal, she barely came up with February’s rent after appealing to a friend and has no idea how she’s going to come up with March’s rent.
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All said and done, Dolezal remains unapologetic, insisting she is not white and isn’t about to stoop or grovel.
‘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.’
Dolezal anti-climatic descent came after she was exposed in June 2015 when a local television crew asked her if she was African American?
Pictures of a younger, white-skinned and blonde-haired Dolezal soon surfaced leading to a dizzy foray with the tabloids.
Having once sued historically-black Howard University for racial discrimination, because she was white, Dolezal says along with being turned down for 100 jobs, her memoir, ‘In Full Color’ was rejected by 30 publishers before finding a taker.
But perhaps seeking to round up some new attention (when’s the memoir out?) Dolezal has upset 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?’
