Sometimes it’s hard to admit wrongdoing — just ask Rachel Dolezal. After she made headlines last year for falsely representing herself as black while head of a local NAACP chapter, Dolezal eventually admitted that she was “born white.” Now, almost one year later, Dolezal is here to tell us that she has no regrets.
Dolezal was on The Today Show on Tuesday to reflect on her life since her estranged white parents outed her true race. “I don’t have any regrets about how I identify. I’m still me and nothing about that has changed,” she says.
She continues:
“I do wish that I could have given myself permission to really name and own the me of me earlier in life. It took me almost 30 years to get there,” she said. “Certainly, I feel like — you know — it’s a complex issue. How do you just sum up a whole life of kind of coming into who you are in a sound bite? So those conversations — I feel like moving forward. I don’t have any regrets about that.”
So Dolezal wishes she hadn’t lied about being born to white parents, perhaps, but doesn’t regret continuing to identify as black. She says that in the past year, people who have also been caught between “boundary lines of race, or culture, or ethnicity” have told her their stories, and that her experience has forced people to ask, “What is race?… Why do we still want to go back to that worldview of separate races?”
(Via Today)