White [Black pretender] nut Rachel Dolezal: 'I'm not going to stoop and apologise and grovel'

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/25/rachel-dolezal-not-going-
stoop-apologise-grovel

Two years ago, she was a respected black rights activist and teacher. Then
she was exposed as a white woman who had deceived almost everyone she
knew. Why did she do it?

pokane is a modest town of wide streets and snow-capped horizons in
Washington state, 90 miles from the Canadian border. Its population is 91%
white, and voted heavily for Donald Trump. The lunchtime crowd in a
downtown hotel bar is too absorbed in the ice hockey game on big screens
to notice the woman who sidles into the lobby, and though curious to see
what kind of attention she would attract, I feel relieved for her. Her
great spiralled mane bounces as she approaches in a jade dress and heels,
but only a fool would mistake the look for self-assurance.

Two years ago, life was going well for Dolezal. Branch president of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and
chair of Spokane’s police ombudsman commission, she was well known and
respected for her civil rights activism. Her Eastern Washington University
students adored her; her 21-year-old son was about to intern for a
diversity advocacy group in Washington DC; her younger son was doing well
in high school. When a local TV news crew arrived one afternoon to
interview her, Dolezal thought they were there to talk about hate crimes.

“Are you,” asked the reporter, “African American?” Like a cartoon, her
features froze. “I don’t understand the question.” The reporter pressed,
“Are your parents white?” Dolezal turned from the camera and fled.

Footage of the confrontation flew around the world. Dolezal’s white
parents released photographs of their daughter as a blonde white child,
and appeared on TV to denounce her as a fraud; she had been living a lie,
pretending to be black, when she was no more African American than they
were. Dolezal resigned from her NAACP position, was fired by the
university, lost her local newspaper column and was removed from the
police ombudsman commission. Enthralled by her disgrace, talkshows and
radio phone-ins sneered and raged. Why did she do it? What had she been
thinking? When it emerged that she had once sued a university for
discriminating against her because she was white, Dolezal’s notoriety was
complete.

African American commentators called her a “blackface”, guilty of the
worst extremes of cultural appropriation. She was “mentally ill”, and had
cheated black people out of positions that were rightfully theirs. When
Dolezal quoted the activist Dick Gregory to black talkshow host Loni Love
– “White isn’t a race, it’s a state of mind” – the host exploded: “No, let
me tell you something. I’m black. I can’t be you, I can’t reverse myself.
That’s the difference.” Twitter span with comic memes, and still burns
with comments along the lines of: “Why hasn’t anybody beaten her up
already?”

“This is obviously an issue a lot of people want to say things about,”
reflects Dolezal now. “And it needs to be talked about, so it’s kind of
helpful to create a punching bag. There’s nobody saying, ‘Well, that’s
racist if you say that about Rachel’, or ‘That’s sexist if you say that
about Rachel.’ There’s no protected class for me. I’m this generic,
ambiguous scapegoat for white people to call me a race traitor and take
out their hostility on. And I’m a target for anger and pain about white
people from the black community. It’s like I am the worst of all these
worlds.”

Today Dolezal is jobless, and feeding her family with food stamps. A
friend helped her pay this month’s rent; next month she expects to be
homeless. She has applied for more than 100 jobs, but no one will hire
her, not even to stack supermarket shelves. She applied for a position at
the university where she used to teach, and says she was interviewed by
former colleagues who pretended to have no recollection of having met her.
The only work she has been offered is reality TV, and porn. She has
changed her name on all her legal documents, but is still recognised
wherever she goes. People point at her and laugh.

The 39-year-old says she can count the friends she has left in town on her
fingers. “Right now the only place that I feel understood and completely
accepted is with my kids and my sister.” She has written a memoir, titled
In Full Color, but 30 publishing houses turned her down before she found
one willing to print it. “The narrative was that I’d offended both
communities in an unforgivable way, so anybody who gave me a dime would be
contributing to wrong and oppression and bad things. To a liar and a fraud
and a con.”

She wrote it, she says, “to set the record straight. But also to open up
this dialogue about race and identity, and to just encourage people to be
exactly who they are.” Some will read it as the first draft of a new
version of identity politics, which casts race – just like gender – on a
spectrum, and its author as the world’s first trans-black case. Others
won’t believe a word of it. I’m not even sure whether this is a story
about race, or a strange tale of one family’s dysfunction.

Dolezal was born at home in 1977, “on the side of the mountain” in rural
Montana, to a pair of white Christian fundamentalists called Larry and
Ruthanne; they entered “Jesus Christ” on her birth certificate as the only
other witness to her birth. From a young age, Dolezal and her older
brother Joshua were put to work on the family homestead, weeding
vegetables, foraging for berries and hunting elk; in full-length homemade
dresses and dog hair sweaters, she “looked like something out of Little
House On The Prairie”. Dirt poor and uneducated, her parents lived by the
Bible, spoke in tongues and beat her.

“I felt like I was constantly having to atone for some unknown thing.
Larry and Ruthanne would say I was possessed and exorcise my demons,
because I was very creative and that was seen as sensual, which was of the
devil. It seems like everything that came naturally, instinctively to me
was wrong. That was literally beaten into us. I had to redeem myself,” she
says with a light, mirthless laugh, “from being me. And I never felt good
enough to be saved.”

Blond and freckled, “like Pippi Longstocking”, she recalls choosing brown
crayons to draw pictures of herself with dark skin and curly hair, like
the Bantu women she saw in National Geographic. She would hide in the
garden, smear herself in mud, and fantasise that she had been kidnapped
from Africa. What she describes as a profound sense of not belonging
followed her to school, where the other children wore trainers and had
Doritos in their packed lunches, not elk tongue sandwiches. She did
everything she could to fit in, picking huckleberries to earn money to buy
Nikes, “but I knew I wasn’t one of them. I was always on the fringe.” The
only person who really understood her life was Joshua, but he was the
favoured child, the son, and her relationship with her brother grew
increasingly uneasy.

Dolezal says the first true love she ever knew was for the black Haitian
baby and three African American babies her parents adopted in quick
succession when she was 15. They said they were “saving children from the
war on the unborn”; but Ruthanne soon self-diagnosed with chronic fatigue
syndrome, and the care of Dolezal’s new siblings fell to their big sister.
Simply changing their homemade cloth diapers, Dolezal writes, “was like
working on an assembly line”. As they grew older, she became highly
attuned to racial bias in Montana, and felt fiercely protective towards
them. She learned to braid their hair, taught them black history, and
writes: “A funny thing happened. I began to feel even more connected to it
myself. I began to see the world through black eyes.”

She read about a fellowship in Jackson, Mississippi which preached racial
reconciliation and ran a Christian community where blacks and whites
pooled their wages and shared their meals. When the time came to leave for
college, she chose a school in Jackson, and set off for the south. On
arrival she joined the fellowship, and at college signed up to the Black
Students’ Union. “I didn’t really feel comfortable around southern whites,
because the world view in the south is just so ingrained. But I felt this
huge sense of homecoming with regards to the black community. On the white
side I noticed hatred, fear and ignorance. And on the black side I noticed
fear, anger and pain. I felt more at home with the anger and pain towards
whites, because I had some anger and pain – toward not just my parents but
also, even though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it then, towards
white supremacy. I unapologetically stood on the black side. I was
standing with my convictions, standing also with my siblings, standing
with justice.”

As time went on, she took to wearing dashikis and braiding her hair. “For
me it was a political statement. It was me saying: ‘I am renouncing the
propaganda standards of European beauty being superior.’ It was almost
like cultural disobedience, going the other way, to say, ‘You know, this
is actually beautiful to me.’” Cultural appropriation wouldn’t become a
buzzword until many years later, “but I had the clear feeling that I
didn’t want to offend anybody,” Dolezal says. Cultural appropriation is
defined as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural
expressions or artefacts from someone else’s culture without permission”;
Dolezal consulted African American women in her church about the protocol
of braiding her hair. “And they were like, ‘To copy is to compliment.’
Everybody said that.”

When strangers began to assume from her appearance that she was black, she
did not correct them. “I felt like the misperception was maybe that it was
biological. But I felt what they were perceiving was accurate.” For the
first time in her life, she felt beautiful.

Her parents didn’t think so. “They would act disgusted, like, ‘Why would
you do that to your hair?’” Visits home became increasingly tense, for
though still terrified of God and hell, Dolezal was growing more and more
conflicted. “I was attracted to women as well as men, for which I felt
very, very sinful. I mean, my first kiss was with a black woman, and it
was like a whole year repenting for the feelings that I got from it.”

Salvation, in every sense, presented itself in the form of an African
American born-again Christian in Jackson called Kevin. In her final year
of college, when she was 22, the couple became engaged. Months before they
were due to be married, Dolezal lost her virginity to him. “I called and
told [her father] Larry the next morning. It was like a confessional,
basically, and I said I want to make it right with God. So, sex on Monday,
we got married on Friday.”

It was not a happy marriage. She says Kevin hated her looking black, so
Dolezal went back to “repressing and censoring myself” by dressing as a
white, silky blonde. He was bewildered by her application to study fine
art at Howard University in Washington DC – “Why do you want to go to a
black university?” – but she won a graduate scholarship and teaching
position on the strength of a portfolio of artwork featuring exclusively
black and African themes. If Howard was surprised when their scholarship
student turned out to be white, Dolezal says no one ever said so. “The
whole first year everything was fine. Everyone was cool.”

But by the end of her first year she was heavily pregnant, at which point
her tutor rescinded her scholarship and teaching position. She sued Howard
for discrimination on the grounds of gender, and – in a move that would
later prove reputationally catastrophic – also race: because she was
white.

Dolezal blames her lawyer. He “latched on”, she says, to the fact her
tutor had told her: “Your white relatives can probably pay your tuition.”
But she looks awkward and defensive as she says this. “I didn’t
understand. I wasn’t a law expert. I don’t know precedents. I don’t know
all these strategies and ways to fight a case.” Did she honestly believe
she was discriminated against for being white? “I would say the primary
discrimination was gender.” She pauses. “It sounds bad, right. It sounds
like I just played that card for my advantage. But I just knew that if I
did not have my scholarship, we were going to lose our apartment and Kevin
was going to have to drop out of school.”

The couple and their young son, Franklin, moved to north Idaho. The
marriage was increasingly unhappy. She recalls a photo taken of her
shortly before she and Franklin left, “with bleach blond hair. And I look
so dead inside. I remember feeling like I was almost gone, like I had
repressed and suppressed all of myself.”

At Howard she had been introduced to the idea that racial identity was “an
invention of human beings”; an arbitrary classification devised by
colonial whites to justify their power and privilege. “It’s socially
constructed as a world view, and people operate within it, but that also
means that it can be reconstructed or deconstructed. And this was a great
awakening for me, because it meant I wasn’t forced to own whiteness. It
wasn’t like the honest thing to do is say, ‘I’m white’, because race is a
social construct. And this gave me this great sense of internal freedom: I
wasn’t actually all fucked up. I was actually on to something this whole
time.”

Newly divorced, she reached a decision. “For the first time in my life, I
really decided consciously to be free from the repression, and free from
feeling like I had to do things in a way that was acceptable to other
people. I had the courage to be exactly who I was.” From that day on,
Dolezal would be unambiguously and publicly black, and remains so to this
day.

It was surprisingly easy. She sunbathed, styled her hair into braids or
dreadlocks or weaves, and applied bronzer when her tan faded. She stopped
going to church, began dating men and women, ticked the box marked ‘black’
on medical and employment forms (she still does today), and when anyone
asked about her ethnicity, she would say she was “mixed”. If asked which
parent was black, she would say her mother was white. She made extra
income by braiding hair.

Wasn’t she lying? “The times that I tried to explain more, I wasn’t
understood more. Nobody wanted to hear, ‘I’m pan-African, pro-black,
bisexual, an artist, mother and educator.’ People would just be like,
‘Huh? What? What are you talking about?’ So I felt like by not talking
about my biological ancestry, I gave people the opportunity to relate to
me as an individual, not part of a group.”

But she was presenting herself as part of the “black” group, wasn’t she?
“I do think a more complex label would be helpful, but we don’t really
have that vocabulary. I feel like the idea of being trans-black would be
much more accurate than ‘I’m white’. Because you know, I’m not white.
There is a black side and a white side on all kinds of issues, whether
it’s political, social, cultural. There’s a perspective, there’s a
mentality, there’s a culture. To say that I’m black is to say, this is how
I see the world, this is the philosophy, the history, this is what I love
and what I honour. Calling myself black feels more accurate than saying
I’m white.”

Dolezal began working at two colleges, one in north Idaho, one in east
Washington. Before long she was teaching African and African American art
history, devising an Africana studies syllabus, and working a third job at
the Human Rights Education Institute (HREI), where she was soon made
director of education. She became friends with an older civil rights
activist who observed, “It seems like you could use a dad and Franklin
could use a grandpa,” and became her informal adoptive father; she called
him Dad. When her adoptive teenage brother Izaiah came to live with her,
Dolezal became his legal guardian and presented him – at his request – as
her biological son.

With the jigsaw of her new racial identity complete, Dolezal’s profile as
an academic and civil rights activist began to attract the attention of
local white supremacist groups. Nooses started turning up on her front
porch, and racist hate mail in her mailbox. Sinister men showed up at her
office to issue threats; there were mysterious break-ins. In 2011 she
moved the family across the state border to Spokane, and became involved
in the local NAACP chapter. As the Black Lives Matter movement grew,
Dolezal became an increasingly vocal protester, and was persuaded by
fellow activists to apply for a vacancy on the Spokane police ombudsman
commission. She won the position, and was nominated chair. Elected
president of the NAACP’s Spokane chapter a few months later, by 2015 she
was “not just perceived as black, but black and ‘uppity’.” She had never
been happier.

Dolezal might still have been leading that life today. But in spring 2015,
the Spokane police chief wearied of his troublesome ombudsman chair, and
hired a private investigator to dig around for dirt. The PI knocked on
Larry and Ruthanne’s door in Montana. All it took was a few words and old
family photographs, and the chief was rid of his irritant at a stroke. The
press were tipped off, the “Rachel Dolezal race faker” story broke, and
within days Dolezal’s whole life lay in ruins.

Not once in three hours does Dolezal’s composure falter as she relives
this story. I’m not sure how to read the glassy self-possession. Sometimes
I wonder whether the isolation of her childhood left her strangely
disconnected, naive about human nature and unable to grasp the way most
people’s minds work. How else to explain why it never occurred to someone
so clearly intelligent that black people, her friends and colleagues
especially, might be furious with her?

The charge that she cheated them out of opportunities rightfully theirs
came as a terrible shock. All her activist positions, she points out, were
unpaid, and her Howard scholarship was neither reserved for black students
nor won by false pretences. She says she has always been breadline poor;
the idea that she got rich by pretending to be black looks absurd.

But to appropriate blackness without having experienced a lifetime of
racism strikes many African Americans as equally absurd – and insulting.
Dolezal wasn’t prepared for this critique, either. “Have I had experiences
by other people identifying me as black and behaving towards me as black?
Yes. Just for as long as maybe somebody who was born categorised as black?
No.”

Some of the worst things that have happened to Dolezal came in her
childhood and her marriage – before she presented herself as black. Does
she think some African Americans struggle to see that white people can
suffer, too? “I think there’s definitely a stereotype of white privilege,
and that stereotype gets expanded to mean rich, not oppressed, not
suffering, et cetera. And yes, it’s a misperception.” The undeniable
existence of white privilege, she argues, does not preclude the
possibility of white pain.

Dolezal’s desire to correct this misperception in her book is entirely
understandable, but I wish someone had told her that readers can only take
so much misfortune before doubt sets in: I have never read a more
exhaustive encyclopaedia of outlandish injustice. In person, by contrast,
she comes across as highly credible, and her central claim that a lie can
be more honest than a biological “truth” has an internal logic. I don’t
think Dolezal deliberately or knowingly lies. What she calls her “creative
non-fiction” does, though, make me uneasy. She has admitted to fabricating
needless deceits in the past – she once claimed to have been born in a
tepee – which makes me worry that her subjective concept of truth matters
more to her than veracity. The way she justifies her race discrimination
claim against Howard feels more telling than I think she realises: “I felt
I was surviving in order to protect other people. It was my financial aid
package that Kevin relied upon, I was seven months pregnant, so you know,
a black man and black child also needed this.” What makes victimhood such
a dangerous narrative is the false promise that it can justify almost
anything.

She seems to have been inexplicably wronged by an extraordinary number of
people, and I wonder if one reason behind so many fallouts was others’
nagging sense that she was somehow hiding something. As she says herself,
“I’ve never been fully transparent or an open book, even to those you’d
call close friends.” In the aftermath of Dolezal’s exposure, friends and
activists abandoned her; the women’s leadership group to which she
belonged expelled her. The only friends who stood by her were the handful
of clients whose hair she braids. Just as her world was imploding, Dolezal
discovered she was pregnant. Her son Langston, after the writer Langston
Hughes, has just turned one.

Dolezal finds herself in a curious catch-22. Nowadays we would not call
someone who presents as a woman, but was registered a boy at birth, a
liar. We would not blame her for any subterfuges she might have felt
compelled to commit, or cite them as proof of her untrustworthiness. But
because Dolezal is seen to have lied about her race, her credibility has
been undermined in the eyes of the law. Her book contains many details
about her family which she says help make sense of her story; but they
have not been corroborated by them, so cannot be repeated here for fear
that a libel court would reject them as the claims of a self-confessed
liar.

If the narrative of fluid, non-binary gender identity is now widely
accepted, Dolezal believes the same should apply to race. “It’s very
similar, in so far as: this is a category I’m born into, but this is
really how I feel.”

Is racial identity as fluid as gender? “It’s more so. Because it wasn’t
even biological to begin with. It was always a social construct.”

Trans commentators have been incensed by the suggestion of parallels.
“Transgender people transition out of medical necessity,” wrote one.
“Dolezal’s ‘transition’ to black, on the other hand, is surrounded by
layers of deception.” They argue that her colour was a choice, so cannot
be analogous to their gender identity. But if we believe someone born
without ovaries or a womb can be a woman, and accept radical surgery as a
legitimate corrective necessity, is it so different for a woman who is
born white but feels black to reposition herself on the racial spectrum?

According to Dolezal, some trans people saw no difference between her
sense of identity and theirs; one group printed up “TransRachel” T-shirts
and mailed her one. Last year Rogers Brubaker, a professor of sociology at
the University of California drew similar parallels in his book, Trans:
Gender and Race In An Age Of Unsettled Identities.

“I feel that I was born with the essential essence of who I am, whether it
matches my anatomy and complexion or not,” says Dolezal. “I’ve never
questioned being a girl or woman, for example, but whiteness has always
felt foreign to me, for as long as I can remember. I didn’t choose to feel
this way or be this way, I just am. What other choice is there than to be
exactly who we are?”

It’s possible that Dolezal’s story isn’t really about race at all. When
Larry and Ruthanne exposed her, the humiliation and rejection “felt like
reliving my childhood trauma on a global scale”, she says. Sometimes I
wonder whether Dolezal is locked into a family psychodrama being played
out through faith and race. Her description of the decision to begin a new
life as a black woman sounds uncannily like being born again; her sons
have been raised to regard white society with the same fearful suspicion
she was taught to feel for the godless, in the bunker mentality of her
Christian childhood. Although “spiritual”, Dolezal is no longer religious.
She is estranged from two of her adoptive brothers, has not spoken to
Larry and Ruthanne or Joshua for years, and does not expect to again. “I
was talking to Izaiah the other day, and I said, ‘I don’t even know if I’d
go to their funerals.’”

What hurts Dolezal most is not her parents’ betrayal or white people’s
mockery, but the anger of the black community. “I did feel like I was
evicted in 2015. That was very painful, to feel kicked out of it. I think
it’s a mix of anger and sadness really for me, because I’ve struggled to
stay away from turning bitter. But I do resent the fact that people knew
that I gave so much, and I’ve done good things in the community. And when
I could no longer do things for people I was thrown away.”

But Dolezal, say her critics, was still left with a privilege no one truly
black will ever enjoy. She could always choose to be white again, and so
by definition can never know what it really is to be black. I ask Dolezal
if she considered going back to being white.

“No. This is still home to me. I didn’t feel like I’m ever going to be
hurt so much that I somehow leave who I am, because I’m me. It really is
who I am. It’s not a choice.”

In all the intrigue and drama of her disgrace, does she think she’s done
anything wrong? “No, I don’t. I don’t think you can do something wrong
with your identity if you’re living in your authenticity, and I am. If I
thought it was wrong, I would admit it. That’s easy to do, especially in
America. Every politician, they’re like, ‘I’m sorry’ and then they just
move on and everybody’s like, ‘Oh, they apologised and it’s all good’.
Five minutes later, nobody remembers it. I’m not going to stoop and
apologise and grovel and feel bad about it. I would just be going back to
when I was little, and had to be what everybody else told me I should be –
to make them happy.” •

‘Who does she think she is?’ Rachel Dolezal in her own words: an extract
from her new book

I arrived at Belhaven college in Mississippi in 1996 aged 18, looking like
I’d just stepped off the set of Little House On The Prairie. Wearing a
homemade dress and no makeup, I walked into the cafeteria on the first day
and saw that it was completely segregated, with all the tables occupied by
white students, except for one on the far side of the room.

As I walked through the room, my heart nearly skipped a beat. Everyone
looked so normal compared with me. Searching for a reassuring face and not
finding one, I arrived at the black table in the corner. That I shouldn’t
sit there because I was born to white parents and all the table’s
occupants were black didn’t occur to me. I gravitated to where I felt most
comfortable, and, after the initial awkwardness wore off, that’s how the
people sitting there made me feel.

Looking back on this moment, I wonder if the students at that table felt
sorry for me. Regardless of their motivations, they were incredibly kind
to me. When they started talking about the Black Student Association (BSA)
meeting scheduled for that afternoon, they only shrugged and smiled when I
expressed a desire to join them.

I delivered an overly earnest speech explaining how passionate I was about
black culture
It was the first meeting of the year, which meant dues needed to be paid
and all the leadership positions filled. Excited to join my first student
organisation, I secured my membership with a five-dollar bill and watched
as people were voted into office. It quickly became clear that no one
wanted to be the historian (responsible for documenting the club’s
activities). There was a long, awkward moment of silence. Finally, I
raised my hand and started walking towards the front of the room. As I
did, I was greeted with barely muffled snickering. Even the president,
Winston Trotter, couldn’t stop laughing. “Hold up,” he said. “Why are you
here?”

Being raised with no sense of humour whatsoever, I delivered an overly
earnest speech explaining how passionate I was about black culture, how
I’d always felt a connection with blackness, and how deeply I cared about
my siblings’ future. “But what exactly do you know about black history?”
someone asked.

The rambling dissertation that followed encompassed all the black
historical figures I admired most, and was so long-winded Winston had to
cut me off. “We need to wrap this meeting up, so let’s just go ahead and
vote.”

Running unopposed, I won in a landslide.

As I got more involved with campus activism, my appearance became more
Afrocentric. I started wearing my hair in box braids and sporting dashikis
and African-patterned dresses. I thought these clothes were beautiful, and
in the Mississippi heat, the fabric did a good job of keeping you cool.

Most people didn’t know what to make of me. “So, what are you?” I was
often asked. Because I didn’t know how to articulate who I was, I’d end up
telling them nearly everything about my life. I’d usually start off by
saying that my parents were white before describing how I was
instinctively drawn to black aesthetics, culture and history; then I would
mention my siblings and the racial justice work I was doing.

These rambling answers satisfied few people – and bored the pants off
most. People just wanted me to say I was black or white. They didn’t want
to hear, in all its boring complexity, about my journey to self-
identification. I could see it in the way they stopped making eye contact;
they were tired of listening. I noticed how much more comfortable black
people who assumed I was black were around me. The minute I corrected
them, the comfort level disappeared, so I stopped doing it. If they
identified me as a light-skinned black woman or a mixed-race woman, which
they frequently did, I didn’t mind.

My laissez-faire attitude was much more difficult to maintain when it came
to filling out applications and medical forms. When I was living in
Mississippi, I felt I should continue ticking the white box – even though
I’d begun to feel that that description was increasingly
misrepresentative. I would sometimes check Other. If I could, I would
avoid making a selection altogether.

The increasingly Afrocentric look I sported invited all sorts of
criticism. Some said it was “just a phase”, while others, mostly white
students, told me I shouldn’t dress the way I did because it was
disingenuous or looked silly. While walking through the cafeteria one day,
proudly wearing a dashiki and a headwrap, I passed a table of white girls
and heard one of them say, “Who does she think she is, wearing all that
stupid African shit? She’s not black!”

As I continued to make my way toward the black table, my friend Nikki, a
member of the BSA and a star of the women’s basketball team, confronted
the girl. “You’re sitting there talking about Rachel’s outfit while you’re
probably getting a yeast infection from wearing those skintight jeans,”
she said loudly. “Besides, Rachel’s a lot blacker than I am, so deal with
it!”

It was the first time anyone had recognised and defended how I felt. It
made me feel understood, like I’d finally found my place in the world.

This is an edited extract from In Full Color: Finding My Place In A Black
And White World, by Rachel Dolezal, published next month by BenBella Books
at £16.99. Order a copy for £14.44 from the guardian bookshop


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Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party has run out of gas.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for ending the disaster of the
Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.

ObamaCare is a total 100% failure and no lie that can be put forth by its
supporters can dispute that.

Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum
wage, no benefits and the primary revenue stream for ObamaCare. It can't
be funded with money people don't have, yet liberals lie about how great
it is.

Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
liberal democrat donors.