Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
Monday was a great day to be Steve Harvey — even if Jimmy Kimmel did blame him Sunday night for the Oscars’ huge best picture mistake. Harvey, who infamously named the wrong winner for
Miss Universe 2015 — it was Miss Philippines Pia Wurtzbach, not Miss Colombia Ariadna Gutiérrez — surrendered his televised-gaffe throne on Sunday night, and early Monday morning he was celebrating and dishing. “I’d like to say in the words of Martin Luther King: ‘Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, I’m free at last,’” Harvey said on his KJLH-FM morning show after the wrong movie was announced as best picture at the Academy Awards on Sunday night when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly declared La La Land the best-picture winner, and moments later, in what is now viewed by many as the biggest award show mix-up in history, the truth came out: Moonlight won. Harvey, a comic and TV host, talked on his radio show about the death threats he got after the Miss Universe show and mused at one point about whether Beatty would need security because of the error. Harvey did. One difference between the two mistakes: Harvey couldn’t read what was on his card, which he said looked different from what he’d seen in rehearsal. Dunaway did read what was on the card Sunday night — but Beatty had been given the wrong one.
Rachel Dolezal, 39, the former leader of the NAACP branch in Spokane, Wash., who resigned in 2015 amid criticism that she was a white woman passing herself off as black, said she is nearly homeless. Dolezal told Britain’s The Guardian newspaper that she cannot find a job and the only work she has been offered is in reality TV and adult films. While she has legally changed her name on legal documents, she said she’s readily recognized no matter where she goes. Dolezal has acknowledged that she is “Caucasian biologically,” but says she still identifies as black. She explained to The Guardian that she “began to see the world through black eyes” as a teenager after her parents adopted four black children. Dolezal says she decided to be publicly black years later after a divorce. Dolezal, who maintains that she did nothing wrong, will detail her experience in an upcoming memoir titled In Full Color.