Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP chapter president who made headlines last year after it was discovered she had “passed for Black” for decades despite being born to White parents, this week announced she has been signed to write a book on race. (AP Photo/Nicholas K. Geranios)
Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP chapter president who made headlines last year after it was discovered she had “passed for Black” for decades despite being born to White parents, this week announced she has been signed to write a book on race.
Dolezal spoke to NBC’s “Today” host Savannah Guthrie April 12 about her life since the controversy and she said she is ready to “move on.”
“I don’t have any regrets about how I identify. I’m still me and nothing about that has changed,” said the “trans-racial” woman.
Dolezal was made the butt of many jokes and faced intense condemnation from African-Americans who said she—with her often braided or texturized hair and her tinted skin—represented the worst of White appropriation of Black culture. Her claim that she identified as Black since the age of 5, despite her heritage, also set off a national debate about racial identity.
“I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon, and black curly hair ,” she told NBC’s Matt Lauer in a June 2015 interview.
In a December 2015 interview with The Guardian she expanded on “her truth.”
“For me, how I feel is more powerful than how I was born. I mean that not in the sense of having some easy way out. This has been a lifelong journey. This is not something that I cash in, cash out, change up, do at a convenience level or to freak people out or to make people happy,” she said. “If somebody asked me how I identify, I identify as Black. Nothing about Whiteness describes who I am.”
The civil rights activist, who was fired from her position teaching Africana studies at Eastern Washington University and also resigned from her NAACP post, said the past year has been challenging. But things are looking up, she said. She expanded her family earlier this year, giving birth to a son, whom she is raising along with two other children, one of whom is her adopted brother.
And, she is also looking forward to writing her book, which will be about people “caught between boundary lines of race or culture or ethnicity” and “this larger issue of if you don’t fit into one box and if you don’t stay there your whole life, being identified from birth as who you are – what does that look like?”
The book will also examine the racial and social justice issues she has researched for years.
“Race is such a contentious issue because of the painful history of racism,” she told “Today.” She added, “Race didn’t create racism, but racism created race.”
According to Entertainment Weekly, Dolezal’s book will be published by BenBella Books in March 2017.
