The strange story of Rachel Dolezal, the ex-NAACP president who pretended to be black, continues. As she told the media, she very much considers herself to be black. Some older interviews are starting to surface, and we’re catching a glimpse of Dolezal’s stances on prior kertuffles. It turns out Dolezal had a huge problem with Ridley Scott‘s Exodus: Gods and Kings film because white actors were cast in African roles.
When the Exodus controversy went down, Scott defended his choice by saying no studio would finance a film where “my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such.” Christian Bale (who played Moses) publicly supported Ridley’s casting decisions. Bale even made the problem worse by saying, “I don’t know the fact that I was born in Wales and suffer with this skin that can’t deal with the sun should dictate” whether he could play Moses. Bale’s use of the term “suffer” was particularly clueless.
Speaking in a prior interview with Spokane Station KYRS, Dolezal spoke of her outrage at how the movie used “white, European actors playing North African historical figures, like they were in the ’30s and ’40s.” She publicly called for an Exodus boycott:
“Hopefully nobody goes to that film. We need to boycott that film, from my perspective, because it’s miseducation, it’s misrepresentation, it’s highly offensive to the people that actually were living during that time and also to people today. It’s robbing and shredding ancestry and history … It’s really disturbing that this is something that’s still perpetrated. But if people go to that without knowing … again, just with the public education system, then they’re probably doing to think that’s how it happened. Because Greece did invade Egypt at some point, so it must have been during that time, right? And all the darker skinned people must be villains, that’s pretty natural. We accept that under the white supremacy tradition. It’s really disturbing that this is still something perpetrated.”
All of this is coming from the queen of “misrepresentation.” Dolezal’s alleged perpetration of a long-running scheme to live as a black person is also “highly offensive” to people. Everything she’s complaining about here, including the “robbing and shredding [of] ancestry and history,” were things she did for years. Dolezal had no problem calling others out on their problematic ways, but she excused herself for the same behavior.
(via National Review)
