Rachel Dolezal, the local NAACP president in Washington state who resigned after it was revealed that she is white and not black, is now braiding hair to make ends meet after also losing a part-time university teaching job.
Dolezal told Vanity Fair magazine that her last check from Eastern Washington University was in June and she now sees several clients a week for braids and weaves to support herself and her 13-year-old son.
It appears she’s relying on what she knows: At EWU, Dolezal lectured on the history and politics of black hair and her head is adorned with waist-length braids/weaves.
Dolezal, 37, told the magazine she still identifies as a black woman - despite the fallout that drew national attention when her estranged parents outed her as Caucasian - and that it’s taken a lifetime to “negotiate” that identity.
“It’s hard to collapse it all into just a single statement about what is,” Dolezal told the magazine. “You can’t just say in one sentence what is blackness or what is black culture or what makes you who you are.”
She added that she’s not “African-American.” but “I would say I’m black, and there’s a difference in those terms.”
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