Rachel Dolezal doubles down on her black identity: 'I'm not confused about this'

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July just couldn’t end without more ‘I’m black, trust me’ talk from Rachel Dolezal, could it?

In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Rachel Dolezal doubles down on presumed black identity and opened up about what being born white had done to her life.

“I’ve got to figure it out before August 1, because my last paycheck was like $1,800 in June,” Dolezal said of losing her job as president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP. “[I lost] friends and the jobs and the work and – oh, my God – so much at the same time.”

Despite the public backlash and the fact that friends and coworkers had distanced themselves from her, though, Dolezal insisted that she still identified as black.

“It’s not a costume,” she said. “I don’t know spiritually and metaphysically how this goes, but I do know that from my earliest memories I have awareness and connection with the black experience, and that’s never left me.”

Dolezal also told Vanity Fair’s Allison Samuels she recently received a traffic ticket and the officer marked her down as “black…without even asking.”

“It’s not something that I can put on and take off anymore,” Dolezal told Samuels of her identity. “Like I said, I’ve had my years of confusion and wondering who I really [was] and why and how do I live my life and make sense of it all, but I’m not confused about that any longer. I think the world might be – but I’m not.”

She also continued to deny claims that she “misled” anyone about her racial identity.

“I didn’t deceive anybody,” she said. “If people feel misled or deceived, then sorry that they feel that way, but I believe that’s more due to their definition and construct of race in their own minds than it is to my integrity or honesty, because I wouldn’t say I’m African American, but I would say I’m black, and there’s a difference in those terms.”

**Read the full Vanity Fair interview here**