Rachel Dolezal has just published a memoir: “In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World.” It’s just about as odd as you’d expect.
In addition to talking about growing up with her strictly religious parents when, she claims, she identified as black, Dolezal writes about such life highlights as being born in a teepee with Jesus Christ as a witness and being so poor that she played ball with freshly cut off chicken heads.
She wrote that she had read her grandmother’s National Geographic magazines, where she learned where blackness came from.
–Rachel Dolezal describes oppression she faced while identifying as black–
“I’d stir the water from the hose into the earth … and make thin, soupy mud, which I would then rub on my hands, arms, feet, and legs,” she wrote. “I would pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo… imagining I was a different person living in a different place was one of the few ways … that I could escape the oppressive environment I was raised in.”
In the book, she also claimed that she was molested by her brother and that her parents would beat her for things as small as breaking a dish.
It wasn’t until her parents adopted four black children, which she says they did for tax reasons, that she “felt like I was truly part of a family.”
She then left her Montana home and attended college in Mississippi, where she began to change her look to fit what she saw as her identity. “As I got more involved with the [Black Student Association], campus activism, and my artwork, the more Afrocentric my appearance became,” Dolezal wrote.
She added, “It became easier for me to let them make assumptions about me. I noticed how much more relaxed and comfortable Black people who assumed I was Black were around me.”
“I felt less like I was adopting a new identity and more like I was unveiling one that had been there all along. Finally able to embrace my true self, I allowed the little girl I’d colored with a brown crayon so long ago to emerge.”