Rachel Dolezal, the notorious white lady who spent years pretending to be black, is having a rough time. In an interview with the Guardian, she revealed that she’s unemployed and likely a month away from homelessness.
Dolezal, you’ll recall, became a sensation after she struggled to answer a reporter’s question about her race—specifically, whether she was, in fact, African American. “I don’t understand the question,” she stammered, sending disbelieving palms to foreheads the world around. “Are your parents white?” the reporter persisted. Dolezal ended the interview.
Her parents are indeed white, as photographs provided by them later confirmed. And so began Dolezal’s inglorious fall. According to the Guardian, Dolezal resigned from her role as branch president of the NAACP, was fired from her job as an adjunct instructor at Eastern Washington University, and lost her column at a local Spokane newspaper. And now?
Today Dolezal is jobless, and feeding her family with food stamps. A friend helped her pay this month’s rent; next month she expects to be homeless. She has applied for more than 100 jobs, but no one will hire her, not even to stack supermarket shelves. She applied for a position at the university where she used to teach, and says she was interviewed by former colleagues who pretended to have no recollection of having met her. The only work she has been offered is reality TV, and porn. She has changed her name on all her legal documents, but is still recognised wherever she goes. People point at her and laugh.
She’s written a memoir, which is due out in March, though 30 publishing houses turned her down before she found one to publish it. She said she wrote it to tell her side of the story, “but to also open up this dialogue about race and identity, and to just encourage people to be exactly who they are.”
But in spite of her ordeal, Dolezal doesn’t seem to have many regrets.
“I’m not going to stoop and apologize and grovel and feel bad about it,” she said. “I would just be going back to when I was little, and had to be what everybody else told me I should be — to make them happy.”
She added that she has no intention of “going back to being white.”
“No. This is still home to me. I didn’t feel like I’m ever going to be hurt so much that I somehow leave who I am, because I’m me. It really is who I am. It’s not a choice,” she said.