Remember Rachel Dolezal? She went viral a few years back when she was outed as a white woman pretending to be black, an act she pulled off so convincingly that she even became the leader of the National Association for the Advancement Of Colored People.
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Dolezal was exposed during a live interview, where the reporter talked to her about about racism and activism for 8 full minutes before dropping the bomb on her at the end. Which was a pretty brutal way of doing things:
Indeed, it turned out Rachel’s family heritage is actually Czech, Swedish and German with a touch of Native American. Amazingly, Rachel still identifies as black (she’s ‘transracial’, you see), and appeared on the Tamron Hall Show this week to discuss the fact that she has been unemployable ever since she was outed 6 years ago:
What I really wish is [that] people could see me more for ‘who’ I am [rather] than the ‘what’. A mother, an activist, and an artist, that’s really who I am. When it comes to race and identity, I’ve always identified racially as ‘human’ but have found more of a home in Black culture and the Black community and that hasn’t changed.
I mean I’m still the same person I was in May of 2015. I’m still doing the work, I’m still pressing forward, but it has been really tough for sure. Not having a job for six years, having to create my own job and find my own ways to provide for my children through braiding hair, through grant writing to bring funds into marginalized communities and Black-owned businesses and nonprofits, through painting, through doing pep talks on Cameo.com. So it’s definitely been a long six years but I really strongly believe that as a person you have to just continue to be who you are and you can’t change you who you are.
She says the “negativity” around her identity has prevented her from getting even the most menial of jobs:
I started with applying for all of the things I was qualified for and after interviews and getting turned down, I even applied to jobs that didn’t even require degrees. I’ve applied to be a maid at a hotel, for work at a casino. I wasn’t able to get any of those jobs either.
To be fair to Rachel, she’s done some amazing work for civil rights activism, even while pretending to be black, and so you have to feel sorry for her a little bit even if she did ultimately create this whole mess herself. Truth be told, she did make a pretty convincing black woman:
People pretend to be black all the time but Rachel actually pulled it off and made a whole career out of it. Have to give her top marks for the overall hustle there. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out as a long-term plan and now she’s struggling to even get a job as a hotel maid.
Fair play to her for carrying on the fight though. 99% of people would, if you exposed their entire identities as a lie, probably get a face transplant, change their names, and go start a new life somewhere far away from Western civilisation. But not Rachel Dolezal. She’ll keep identifying as black even if it means no employment for six years running. That’s dedication to your craft right there.
To meet the transracial white man who identifies as Filipino, click HERE. Sigh.
