Lauren Campbell posted the roughly hour-long interview for a thesis project online after Rachel Dolezal’s white parents called the former NAACP leader out for posing as black.
Rachel Dolezal described the struggle of being a black woman in a majority white community during an interview with a student of Eastern Washington University.
Lauren Campbell posted the footage from her 2014 thesis project on YouTube after news broke last week that Dolezal was born to white parents.
Campbell, who is black and has since graduated from EWU, told the Inlander that her interactions at the time with Dolezal felt strange.
"It felt like something’s wrong here, like something is weird about the information she is telling me," Campbell told the Inlander.
In one portion of the interview, Dolezal described being told she was white as a child by a teacher.
She recalled drawing herself with a brown crayon in kindergarten when the teacher told her to use the peach crayon instead. The incident became a symbol for her other struggles with identity, Dolezal told Campbell.
"You choose a side," she said. "You can kind of be a bridge, but pretty much you have a home one place or the other."
Dolezal also described being inspired as an artist by painting portraits of her adopted black siblings. She also said she read books on black history and felt a connection with the themes of struggle and liberation.
In college, she chose to sit at the lunch table with black students — they looked more like her family.
"It was making a choice again," Dolezal said. "Identity, and also that internal struggle. I don't want to be untrue to myself and what I feel even though other people might be going, 'Oh, she isn't owning her white side.'"
After years of pressure to act more white, Dolezal said public perception of her changed after she was the victim of hate crimes.
After becoming director of the Human Rights Education Institute — taking over the former site of an Aryan Nation compound — she said she became the victim of hate crimes from white supremacists.
Slowly, Dolezal said news coverage about her began to change. One description called her a woman from a "transracial family," the next called her a "biracial woman," then later, she was described as black.
"As the hate crimes escalated, the more white supremacy groups did to me and my family, the darker my complexion became in the public's eyes," she said.
She also criticized white people who claim to understand the black community because they have a black friend, or a black partner, or a black child.
"You're using that to justify something — kind of a free pass," she said. "It doesn't mean you understand or identify with the struggle and liberation of that community."
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/1fdOCg1
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