Page 21 - National UF Spring 2017

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NBCBLK's Managing Editor, Amber Payne,
spoke with Rachel Dolezal about living as a
Trans-Black woman, how her identity challenges
white supremacy, and why she just couldn't be a
white ally. In this article, NBCBLK includes an
edited and condensed transcript along with
videos of the conversation.

Rachel Dolezal: I'm 33
'Misunderstood' by
Blacks and 'Slapped
From Both Sides'

By Amber Payne How do you define 'Black' and 'Blackness'?
After years of passing for Black, Rachel Dolezal's Well I think that in America, even though race
truth was very suddenly exposed in 2015.Living in is a social construct, I mean, we say this in
obscurity in Spokane, Washington, the head of the theory, but I think a lot of people don't believe
local chapter of the NAACP was forced to resign after that it really is. And so it's still a very racialized
her story was unraveled by a local news reporter who society. And so there's a line drawn in the
asked her point blank, "Are you African American?" sand.
Dolezal didn't have an answer. She infamously left
And there's a Black and white divide and I
the frame, caught off guard. In the media frenzy that41 stand unapologetically on the Black side of that
divide with my own internal sense of self and
followed, Dolezal admitted that while she was born to my values, and with my sons and my sister and
with the greater cause of really undoing the
56Caucasian parents, she identified as a Black woman. myth of white supremacy.

In her new memoir, "In Full Color: Finding My Place in Credit: NBCBLK
To view the full video interview, go to:
a Black And White World," Dolezal provides some http://nbcnews.to/2mNdh3k

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 told NBCBLK. Adamant that her racial fluidity is

not equivalent to putting on a costume, she continued:

"The color line can't just forever be ingrained in some

kind of one drop rule kind of Jim Crow sense." 63