Rachel Dolezal used to run the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP,
the legendary civil rights group chartered to support black Americans.
But Dolezal isn’t black—she just identifies as black.
— Are you African-American?
— I don’t understand the question.
— Are your parents… are they white?
— And when that fact emerged in 2015, she lost her job and got famous…
…as a national laughingstock.
Dolezal has legally changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo.
But she’s using the name that made her famous to publish her new memoir, "In Full Color."
Dexter Thomas went to Spokane to meet her.
— Yeah, I think he’s a little too radical.
Martin Luther King has been so sanitized, that...
some people don’t even know that he has anything else that’s radical.
— Since the controversy,
Rachel Dolezal has been spending her time at home in Spokane, Washington, trying to rebuild her life.
Now, she’s hoping to tell her side of the story through her new book.
— What’s the point of the book, would you say?
— I really wanted to set the record straight, you know?
Settle things that have been misconstrued about my life,
and document my personal journey and how things fit together for my sons.
— I know you're aware of this,
but there's a lot of black people who feel like what you’re doing is selfish.
— Mhm.
— I mean, it's almost like...
if you got voted off the island, shouldn't you just go?
— Did I get voted off an island?
— You tell me.
— It's kind-of a manufactured frenzy and controversy that got stirred up in 2015, right?
By white media, the white parents, the white police, you know?
Like, those are the people who instigated that controversy.
— So, basically, you’re saying this is... basically…
black people being mad at you is a white conspiracy?
— Based off of a white narrative about me, yes.
— In her book, Rachel Dolezal puts a lot of the blame for society’s view of her on her family.
Two years ago, she was preparing to sue her brother Joshua Dolezal,
for allegedly molesting her younger adopted sister.
According to criminal charges, the victim claimed the abuse occurred over multiple years,
and included forcing her to perform oral sex on him.
But then, her parents appeared on TV:
— It’s Rachel creating her own reality.
— It was just completely heartbreaking that that case actually got shut down,
because they went on a whole national media circuit with CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox News.
They did every major network and my credibility was shot.
— So the case got dropped? — The case got dropped.
— So basically what you're saying is, your parents…?
— Saved their oldest white son from being locked up as a child molester.
And, from their actions, a young black woman suffered.
I mean, that was, like, the tragedy that nobody saw.
— The charges against Joshua Dolezal were dropped by the prosecutors in 2015.
When reached by VICE News for comment, Dolezal said that,
“The lies my sister tells about me and my family are obscene,”
and that, “Celebrity is still her goal, not social justice.”
— I'm hoping that, with the release of the book and getting my true story out there,
I'm able to rebuild enough credibility to where we can get that case, you know, brought back.
— Rachel Dolezal is also hoping that her memoir, "In Full Color,"
will start a conversation about how we think about race in America.
— You know, what is “whiteness,” or “blackness,” or, you know, what does it mean to fall in between?
Or in what ways are we who we are?
I'm not part of that owning, praising, living whiteness.
Like, that's just not... that's not me.
— I mean, being able to distance yourself from that… is kind of a privilege, right?
Being able to say, “You know what? I don't want anything to do with the whiteness.”
— Distancing yourself from privilege is privilege?
— When the police show up, I can't say,
“Woah, woah, woah. Just so you know—I'm not black.”
“I'm actually white.” It doesn't work that way.
— Part of me wonders, I mean, are people actually saying, "You have privilege and you've been privileged"?
Or are people more interested in just calling me white?
— Dolezal says that because of all the negative press, she’s been having trouble getting a job.
So a lot of her income comes from a side hustle she’s had for a long time:
doing black hair.
She says she’s one of the few people in Spokane who can do black hair, and she still has loyal clients.
She’s also selling her artwork, which is something else she’s been doing since she was young.
But recently, she’s having trouble doing that, too.
— This is kind-of all pieces of recycled magazine paper.
Right now, I'm pretty broke, so I can’t afford a lot of paints.
— She hopes her art can serve as a medium for people to better understand her and her identity.
— So the concept here is saying, like, “I don't care what color Rachel is,”
“I don’t care if she is blue, or purple, or green.”
“Like, I just care about the work that she did.” Of course, nobody’s blue or purple or green,
but I painted these like, I'm still me in every single piece.
— Dolezal is launching her book tour in South Africa.
She says the climate there is more receptive to the ideas of racial fluidity and self-identification.
— Some of the freedom fighters there from the Mandela era are working for a non-racial South African society.
They're bringing me down there because they're just like, “We wanna have this conversation.”
— And do you think we're ready to do that here too?
— People just are, you know, not ready to progress and evolve and move forward on the issue of race,
and I think part of what's holding that up is there's still this sense of, like, a score needs to be settled.
You know, we still haven't had reparations,
we still haven't had, like, this Healing, Truth and Reconciliation kind of stuff.
— If we had reparations, would you be getting a check?
— No, I'm not—I don't...
I don't actually identify as African-American.
I identify as black.
Like, would somebody who moved here from Nigeria get a check? No.
There's a Pan-African diaspora, so I’m part of the “pan.”
We all go back to Africa.
We all have a black mother, eventually.