Rachel Dolezal who has been in the news recently because of the controversy surrounding her racial roots as finally spoken
In an Interview with Matt lauer's Today's Show, She opened up on the rather controversial issue and
this is the interview
“The timing of it was a shock. I mean, wow,” Dolezal told Lauer, referring to the revelation that she was white. “The timing was completely unexpected. I did feel, that, at some point, I would need to address the complexity of my identity.”
Lauer asked Dolezal a question she had refused to answer in the past: “Are you an African-American woman?”
“I identify as black,” she said.
Lauer put a photo of Dolezal on the screen. In the photo, which Dolezal said was taken when she was 16 years old, she has blond hair and fair skin. “I would say that visibly she would be identified as white, by people who see her,” she admitted on Friday. Lauer asked her if she openly identified as black at the time. “In that picture, during that time, no,” Dolezal said, though she said her self-identification as a black person began at a young age.
When she was five years old, Dolezal said, she was “doing self-portraits with the brown crayon.”
Asked why she deceived people for so long, Dolezal said that she simply neglected to correct the narrative that developed around her. She used the word “transracial,” and said that a newspaper article once described her as “biracial.” When another article, on alleged racist threats Dolezal was facing, described her as “a black woman,” she again failed to address the inaccuracy.
Images of Dolezal that have proliferated across the Internet since the revelation that she was white show a progressively darkening skin tone and multiple hairstyles. Lauer asked her about those changes, pointedly questioning whether she had purposely darkened her skin.
“I certainly don’t stay out of the sun, and I also, don’t, as some of the critics have said, put on blackface as a performance,” Dolezal said.
“I have a huge issue with blackface. This is not some freak, Birth of a Nation–style blackface performance,” she said. “This is a very real connection.”
Dolezal had previously identified a black man as her father. Asked why she lied, she claimed that he approached her, and that they “connected in a very intimate way, as a family.”
Lauer asked Dolezal if her sons believe she’s black. “I was talking to one of my sons yesterday, and he said, ‘Mom, racially you’re human, and culturally you’re black,’” Dolezal said. “I know that they support me, and that, ultimately, we have each others’ backs.”
The Smoking Gun on Monday uncovered a 2002 lawsuit in which Dolezal alleged Howard University, a historically black university, denied her a scholarship because she was white and pregnant. The suit was touted by many as evidence of Dolezal’s opportunistic relationship with her racial identity. On Tuesday, Dolezal said she still felt she was facing an “injustice” at Howard.
“The reason for my full-tuition scholarship being removed, and my teaching position as well, my T.A. position, was, ‘other people needed more opportunities, and you probably have white relatives who can pay your tuition,’” she told Lauer. “And I thought that was an injustice.”
Dolezal said, looking back, she would have made the most of same decisions. “As much as this discussion has been at my expense, in a very vicious and inhumane way, it’s really about being human,” she said, ticking off a list of terms about identity and race.
“There are probably a few interviews that I would do differently, if circumstances, in retrospect, if I knew what I knew now,” she said. “But my life has been one of survival.”