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

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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Close Readings: What do you mean “we?”

I don’t know about you, but I miss Sarah Palin. She’s still around, of course—on Tuesday she guest-hosted the Today show, and I assume she still has the Fox News show where she connects surviving childhood leukemia to free enterprise or whatever. But I miss Sarah Palin the awful thing that happened to American politics. Now that she’s an awful thing that happened to daytime television, my loathing lacks that tang of panic. Not that Sarah Palin is totally useless. She still serves as a valuable warning in both electoral politics and English usage. Lucky for us, she continues to pose as a competent practitioner of both—as she does in the subject of today’s close reading.

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