Dolezal resigns, tells Today Show “I identify as black,” embarrasses sons

By Dan Brooks in Intersectionality 0 Comment
Rachel Dolezal as a teenager, at Bellhaven University, and during her suit against Howard

Rachel Dolezal as a teenager, at Bellhaven University, and during her suit against Howard

I think my favorite new internet micro-genre is pictures of Rachel Dolezal looking white. There are a lot of them, and I’m sorry we could not include knee-length dreadlocks by a tree in the composite above. Someday this story will end, but yesterday it continued on its natural course: Dolezal resigned from her position at the NAACP. That predictable turn came with the less predictable news that in 2002, she sued Howard University for discriminating against her because she was white. That must have been the old Rachel Dolezal, because the contemporary one told the Today Show she identifies as black. Video after the jump.

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Why won’t we let Rachel Dolezal be “trans-racial?”

By Dan Brooks in Intersectionality, Uncategorized 5 Comments
Spokane NAACP president Rachel Dolezal now and in the late 1990s, respectively

Spokane NAACP president Rachel Dolezal now and in the late 1990s

By now you have either quit Twitter or heard about Rachel Dolezal, the president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP who identifies as black but whose parents insist she is white. It’s not my job to say what races people are, but Ma and Pa Dolezal sure seem to be right. A professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University, Dolezal says in her faculty bio that she received an MFA from Howard and has been the victim of “at least eight documented hate crimes.” That’s a weird item to put in your CV. But everything about the Rachel Dolezal story is weird, from her parents’ estrangement from more than one of their children to her refusal to simply say she is black. Again, it looks like she isn’t. But who gets to decide?

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