Embattled civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal may be weathering a lot of bad press and public mockery, but not from MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry.
In an interview Tuesday with Dolezal, Harris-Perry explored the controversy surrounding Dolezal’s history of claiming falsely that she is an African-American woman.
“I kind of imagined that maybe at some point perhaps after the kids were graduated from high school and in their adult stride that maybe I’d really be able to process that, own it publicly, and discuss that kind of complexity. But certainly, I wasn’t expecting it to be thrust upon me right now,” Dolezal said, referring to questions about whether she’s actually white or black.
“I felt very isolated with my identity virtually my entire life,” she said.
Dolezal, who is white, resigned this week from her position as head of the NAACP’s Spokane, Wash., chapter after her parents, Ruthanne and Larry, revealed last week that their daughter is not, in fact, a black woman.
She maintained in a separate interview with the “Today Show’s” Matt Lauer that she self-identified as black from a very young age.
“I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon, and the black curly hair,” she said.
However, her brother, Ezra Dolezal, said her claim that she identified as an African-American from a young age is inaccurate.
“In 2011, she started to gradually change her appearance, changing her hair and skin tone with makeup,” he told Fox News in a separate interview. “I don’t think there is anything complex about the truth. I don’t know how she is saying it is so complex, because it is really not.”
Ruthanne and Larry also said the crayon anecdote was untrue.
“[I]t simply never happened — he never saw his daughter using brown crayons, instead of ‘peach’…as she claimed she did when she was five years old. He says she didn’t start ‘fantasizing’ herself as black until her 20s or 30s,” celebrity gossip site TMZ reported, citing Dolezal’s father.
Nevertheless, the former NAACP leader maintains that she has long felt compromised in her skin.
“I was socially conditioned to not own that, and to be limited to whatever biological identity was thrust upon me and narrated to me,” she said in her MSNBC interview.
Harris-Perry gave the former NAACP leader room to explain what it means to be an African-American without actually being an African-American.
“It means several things,” Dolezal replied. “First of all, it means that I’ve really gone there with the experience in terms of being a mother of two black sons, and really owning what it means to experience and live black…blackness. So that’s one aspect. Another aspect would be that I, from a very young age, felt a spiritual, visceral — just very instinctual connection with ‘black is beautiful,’ you know, just the black experience and wanting to celebrate that.”
Dolezal in 2002 sued Howard University, a historically African-American college in Washington, D.C., for denying her teaching post and a scholarship because she is a white woman, the Smoking Gun reported.
The lawsuit was eventually dropped and Dolezal was fined $1,000 “in connection with an ‘obstructive and vexatious’ court filing that sought to improperly delay her examination by an independent doctor.”
Harris-Perry spent most of the interview giving Dolezal space to explain herself, throwing mostly softball questions.
At one point, however, the MSNBC host asked Dolezal if she was a “con artist.”
“I don’t think so, you know?” the former NAACP leader said.
Harris-Perry let it go at that.
The interview comes just days after the MSNBC host asked her viewers whether it “is it possible that [Dolezal] might actually be black.”
