Rachel Dolezal: I'm not an African-American, but I'm black
Rachel Dolezal was briefly in the national spotlight in June after she stepped down as president of her local NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, amid questions about her race. After also losing her university teaching gig, she admitted in a new Vanity Fair interview that she's strapped for cash and struggling to make ends meet. But despite the hardships that come with the fallout from a white person claiming to be black, Dolezal isn't letting up on her claim:
The fact that reporter Allison Samuels actually found an Ancestry.com heritage test on Dolezal's doorstep in Spokane is almost too good to be true. Still, Dolezal maintains that while the public may be confused by her identity, her blackness feels real to her.
"It's not a costume," she says. "It's not something that I can put on and take off anymore." Anymore?
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Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.
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