Under my skin, I’m still a black woman
Dolezal tells of her journey from rural white girl to ‘woke soul sista’
IN her heart, she’s still a misunderstood black woman.
Rachel Dolezal — who passed as an African-American civil-rights activist in Spokane, Wash., until her Caucasian parents outed her as white in 2015 — is now stepping back into the spotlight in all her bottle-bronzed, Afro-hair-extensioned glory.
Dolezal has written a memoir in which she compares her travails to slavery and describes her harrowing childhood as a pale, blond girl growing up poor on the side of a Montana mountain.
As she toiled in the garden for her strict, Evangelical parents, she would dream of freeing her inner blackness, she writes in “In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World.”
See, she had read her grandmother’s National Geographic magazines. So she knew about blackness.
“I’d stir the water from the hose into the earth . . . and make thin, soupy mud, which I would then rub on my hands, arms, feet and legs,” Dolezal writes.
“I would pretend to be a darkskinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo . . . imagining I was a different person living in a different place was one of the few ways . . . that I could escape the oppressive environment I was raised in.”
She was so poor that she wore dogfur clothing and played ball with the heads of freshly butchered chickens, she writes. Blessed freedom would come. But first, she had to survive her parents’ beatings, her brother’s molestation and her own wheat-pale skin and hair.
Was Dolezal really assaulted by her brother? Did her parents really force her to eat her own vomit, and was she really born in a teepee?
With so much of her life a blatant fiction, it’s hard to be sure — but it all sure makes for fascinating reading.
Who knew, for example, that Dolezal is a bisexual who suffers from PTSD?
ONa brisk November morning in 1977, Rachel Anne Dolezal came kicking and screaming into a “painfully white world” she’d eventually grow to despise and discard.
It may or may not have been in a teepee, but Jesus Christ was indeed listed as the witness on her birth certificate — Dolezal includes a photo of the document in her book.
Life in the rural Northwest was bleak for a young Dolezal.
She claims that she wore clothes made from dog fur and elk antlers and that, for fun, she and her brother Josh would play “chicken-head baseball,” propelling the severed heads across their yard with a metal bat.
Her family was a pack of “Jesus freaks” who didn’t allow TV and would beat her with a paddle for infractions as minor as breaking a dish.
Her dad often walked around the house nude.
She claims that she was once forced to eat her own vomit after she couldn’t finish a bowl of oatmeal. And that her own brother molested her when she was 12, pinning her and sucking on her nipples one afternoon after a day of picking huckleberries.
She felt black for as long as she could remember, she writes. In selfportraits, she drew a “brown-skinned girl with black curly braids.”
“I usually picked a brown crayon rather than a peach one. Peach simply didn’t resonate with me,” she says.
With platinum-blond hair, sea-foam eyes and patches of freckles sprayed across her fair skin, Dolezal was everything but black.
She didn’t even meet a black person until she was 10.
Still, she writes, “the feeling that I was somehow different from [my family] persisted. I felt Black and saw myself as Black.”
WHEN Dolezal’s parents adopted four black children — solely for the tax deductions, she writes — she took on a maternal role and grew close to her new siblings.
“I found myself drawing closer to something that felt oddly familiar,” Dolezal writes.
“For the first time in my life, I felt like I was truly part of a family.”
She began to teach her siblings about black culture and history and “a funny thing happened. I began to feel even more connected to it myself.”
When she was 17, she had the opportunity to travel to Washington, DC, during summer break and work
for a family friend’s fine-art greeting-card company.
The job consisted mostly of being a nanny and cook, she writes. Thankfully, “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” the 1971 novel by Ernest J. Gaines that tells the story of a slave in the South, provided her “much-needed solace.”
“I could still relate to aspects of her struggle. I certainly wasn’t enslaved . . . but it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to call me an indentured servant,” Dolezal claims.
“Miss Pittman’s plight and her perseverance resonated with me. I knew what it was like to be a child and have to work as hard as an adult, and how it felt to be used and abused.
“I also understood the pain that comes from being treated like less than a full human being . . . and the fortitude required to fight this sort of injustice.”
DOLEZAL escaped rural Montana for a small college in Jackson, Miss., and her innerblackness flourished.
She “was soon living something of a double life.” She spent her week living on campus with a blond, blue-eyed ballet-dancer roommate and her weekends attending an all-black church.
“As I got more involved with the [Black Student Association], campus activism, and my artwork, the more Afrocentric my appearance became,” Dolezal writes.
She began wearing her hair in braids and sporting bright dashi- kis. People started to question.
“‘So what are you?’ I was asked all too often,” she says.
“It became easier for me to let them make assumptions about me. I noticed how much more relaxed and comfortable Black people who assumed I was Black were around me.”
She moved to the “poor Black side” of town and was treated “as a member of the community.”
“I would laugh at jokes told at the expense of white people and lodge some pretty fierce critiques about white culture myself,” Dolezal writes.
“I felt less like I was adopting a new identity and more like I was unveiling one that had been there all along. Finally able to embrace my true self, I allowed the little girl I’d colored with a brown crayon so long ago to emerge.”
Ironically, her new black husband, whom she met in Mississippi, wanted her to look as white as possible.
At his request, she did just that, she says — undoing her braids, staying out of the sun and quietly turning back into a white woman.
But clearly, this was a detour from her true path.
She left him and moved in with an uncle in Idaho. During that time, she was diagnosed with PTSD, explored her bisexuality and “once again embraced my inclination toward Black aesthetics.”
“For the first time in my life, I was truly owning who I was: a woman who was free, self-reliant, and, yes, Black,” she writes.
As a professor at North Idaho College and Eastern Washington University, and a director of the local Human Rights Education Institute, she began what she calls the happiest time of her life.
“I was a Black-Is-Beautiful, Black liberation movement, fully conscious, woke soul sista,” she writes.
NOW all she needed was her very own black family. She already had Franklin, 7, her mixed-race child from marriage.
When Dolezal’s now-teen adopted brother Izaiah asked to live with her — to escape the beatings and deprivations of the Montana farm — she leaped at the chance.
People would notice the difference in her boys’ skin tones and ask whether they had different dads. Dolezal would explain, “Yes, Izaiah looks like his dad, and Franklin looks like me.”
She wrote it was technically a “true statement” and “a clever way of telling the truth without spelling out all the details.” She calls it “creative nonfiction.” After Izaiah moved in, Dolezal said she never wore her hair “unaltered” in public.
“I consciously maintained some warmth of color in my skin . . . through sunbathing or bronzer sprays,” she says. “I’d already been identified by the media and other people as Black or biracial countless times, so it wasn’t hard for me to go one step further and fully commit to a look that made visual sense to people who knew me as Izaiah’s mom.”
In 2014, she became the president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP.
Then, on June 11, 2015, everything changed.
Dolezal made a never-substantiated claim of receiving racial threats in the NAACP chapter’s mailbox. Local reporters began to dig, eventually contacting her parents in Montana.
Dolezal lost every job she had and almost all of her friends. Within a couple of days, her life was unrecognizable. At some points, she contemplated suicide.
Today, Dolezal remains “unapologetically Black” and insists race is just a social construct.
“For me, Blackness is more than a set of racialized physical features. It involves acknowledging our common human ancestry with roots in Africa,” she explains in the epilogue of her memoir.
She says she wasn’t just “masquerading” as a black woman — it was part of her identity.
“Just as a transgender person might be born male but identify as female, I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t but expressing something I already was. I wasn’t passing as Black; I was Black, and there was no going back.”
For the first time in life, I was truly owni who I was: a woman wh was free, self-reliant, and, yes, Black. — Rachel Dolezal, in her new memoir, ‘In Full Color’