Rachel Dolezal: NAACP official resigns amid race controversy

Look up any article about President Obama that focuses on his role as the first black president.

Go ahead, do it now.

Here’s how Dolezal responded to a question about her racial identity by NBC’s Savannah Guthrie: “Well, I definitely am not white. Nothing about being white describes who I am. So, you know. What’s the word for it? You know what I mean? The closest thing that I can come to is if — if you’re black or white, I’m black. I’m more black than I am white. So on a level of values, lived experience, currently, I mean, in this moment, that’s — that’s the answer. That’s the accurate answer from my truth.”

For the first time, she also suggested that the people who’ve identified themselves as her parents may not be her biological relatives, seemingly leaving room for the possibility that she does in fact have African ancestry. “Up to this point, I know who raised me,” Dolezal said. “I haven’t had a DNA test. There’s been no biological proof that Larry and Ruthanne are my biological parents.”

The saga of Rachel Dolezal — the former NAACP official who still insists “I identify as black,” despite her parents’ assertions that she’s white — has fueled debates about the very nature of racial identity, and about the mindset that inspired her practically unheard-of brand of deception.

The story, about a person who many critics would argue doesn’t deserve a spotlight, continues because, well, we desperately want answers.

On Tuesday morning, Rachel Dolezal, the now-former Spokane NAACP president whose racial identity became a nationwide controversy when her parents told the media she was a white woman passing for black, finally gave her side of the story to the Today show. Dolezal claimed that her black identity was rooted in something deeper than just skin color or hair, as Vox’s Jenée Desmond-Harris wrote:

Of course, it’s much easier to say that you’ve had to “go there with the [black] experience” than prove you actually have. But the distinction was striking to me because it sounds awfully similar to a point historian Baz Dreisinger made when I spoke with her about the history of white people passing for black.

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart reaction to the Rachel Dolezal story could be summarized in one word: “Whaaaaaaaat?!”

Rachel Dolezal is president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP, a Howard University graduate, an adjunct professor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University, and, according to her application to the policing commission on which she sits, “white, black, and American Indian.”

For her part, Dolezal has accused her parents of physically abusing her and her siblings, reportedly telling the Easterner, a college newspaper — before questions about her background made national news — that “they would punish us by skin color.”