*Ever since Rachel Dolezal was “outed” as being a white woman living as a black woman, we’ve been curious as to how her story would turn out.
Well, it’s still a work in progress we guess we could say, but she does have a new memoir that was just released. It’s called “In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black And White World” and in it, Dolezal provides some context about how a challenging upbringing shaped her search for identity as a black or trans-black woman.
“In order to really move toward what people really think of as some sort of Utopian post-racial society or somehow to really challenge the racial hierarchy, we’re going to have to allow some fluidity,” she confided in A recent interview.
And she added that racial fluidity is not about putting on a costume:
“The color line can’t just forever be ingrained in some kind of one drop rule kind of Jim Crow sense.”
Dolezal spoke to NBCBLK‘s Amber Payne about living as a Trans-Black woman, how her identity challenges white supremacy, and why she just couldn’t be a white ally.
Here is a some of that conversation:
How do you define ‘Black’ and ‘Blackness’?
Well I think that in America, even though race is a social construct, I mean, we say this in theory, but I think a lot of people don’t believe that it really is. And so it’s still a very racialized society. And so there’s a line drawn in the sand. And there’s a Black and white divide and I stand unapologetically on the Black side of that divide with my own internal sense of self and my values, and with my sons and my sister and with the greater cause of really undoing the myth of white supremacy.
Would you have done anything differently when you’re looking back at how everything unfolded? You have received such a backlash, it has really affected your personal life, your financial well-being?
Well I wish that I could have had the chance to tell my whole story and introduce myself to the world instead of being introduced by others in a very negative connotation. So the oppositional people really came out with this narrative of a fraud, a liar and a con and all this kinda stuff before I had a chance to say, “Hello, my name is Rachel and this is who I am.”
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So I think it just kinda steamrolled and got so much momentum of negativity where my life just got shaped by that, and people’s perceptions of me were shaped by that. And I knew very quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to really describe my experience in full context in an interview and so I really needed to do that in book form.
Do you wish that you had maybe addressed this sooner in your life, or come forward to say, ‘I identify as Black — I am a white woman but I identify as Black,’ and start building that as part who you are very publicly?
Well I did, and for people who read the book you can kind of go walk through that journey. The funny thing is that when I was asserting that in college, for example, people were constantly — when I was like, “I was born to white parents,” people are like, “What are you?” and I would tell this long story, which people’s eyes would glaze over and they didn’t really wanna hear all that. But also the response would always be like, “No, you know you’re part Black.”
So as long as I was trying to explain my white parents and my upbringing, and everything, I was constantly being told that I was Black and that I was Blacker than white and all these kind of things. And even like, accused for passing for white. So I just got kind of tired of explaining because it was not helping. People would argue with me as if they knew my identity better than me. And that’s still happening now.
I know last time, I think the term transracial, trans-Black was discussed. How do you define — do those terms come into the way you define yourself?
Absolutely, I think there are too few people — we don’t have the vocabulary to express racial fluidity. But I do like the term trans-Black that Melissa Harris Perry suggested because it does kinda cover the “I wasn’t born this way but this is who I really am” component. But “transracial” it almost sounds like I’m neutral, and I’m not neutral on political and social issues.
Do you feel betrayed at all by the Black community?
I wouldn’t say betrayed. I think just misunderstood by the way that my story was presented initially. It really pricked a lot of nerves and kind of sent people towards the direction of seeing me as the antithesis or the villain or the bad person.
Oh yeah, she’s just getting started. Read/learn MORE at NBCBLK.
