All About Laughs
Rachel Dolezal is back in the headlines after a recent interview with Tamron Hall on the Tamron Hall Show. The controversial figure was updating people on the hardships she’s faced in the years since she first received national attention after she was exposed for pretending to be a black woman while working as a professor at Eastern Washington University.
Back in 2015, Dolezal was ‘Outed’ as a white woman identifying as a Black woman. During that time she was serving as President of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington and was also teaching Africana Studies. Since her true identity has been revealed, Dolezal has been stripped of her title and fired from her jobs.
“What I really wish is [that] people could see me more for ‘who’ I am [rather] than the ‘what,'” Dolezal said. “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.”
She went on to say that she’s still the same person from 2015, but has had a really hard time providing for her family due to the blowback. As a result, she now braids hair predominately to make ends meet.
Back in 2018, a twitter user name @raynesimm, whose real name is Rayne, went viral when she revealed her mom had got her hair braided by Rachel Dolezal. Rayne went on to explain her mother is a traveling nurse who was looking for a hairstylist while visiting Washington when someone referred her to Rachel Dolezal. Rayne went on to say her mother and Rachel are now friends.
Why did my mother get her HAIR BRAIDED BY RACHEL DOLEZAL pic.twitter.com/JedMG8FbUV
— silly girl in a silly skirt (@dumbjuicemfr) April 9, 2018
“I’m still doing the work, I’m still pressing forward, but it has been really tough for sure,” Dolezal added. “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 non-profits, 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 who you are.”
Although Dolezal has two degrees, she struggles to find work no matter the skill level of the jobs she applies for.
“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,” she continued. “Being a maid at a hotel, working at a casino — I wasn’t able to get any of those jobs either.”
Even though life has been tough since 2015, Dolezal refuses to ‘correct’ the way she identifies herself.
Check out the interview below:
