Rachel Dolezal On Whether She's Black: "I Don't Understand the Question"
[There was a video here]
Of all the questions raised by the saga of Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who posed as black in order to move up the ranks of the Spokane NAACP, perhaps the most important one is this: Did anyone, you know, ever ask her if she was black? The answer to that is yes—and Rachel did not handle it very well.
The video you see above is from KXLY in Spokane, which was one of several local news organizations to break open the Dolezal story yesterday. The network posted a full clip of a recent interview to YouTube, which concludes with a reporter confronting Dolezal about her ethnicity.
The reporter first asks Dolezal if her father was able to make it to Spokane this past January for a ribbon cutting event. Dolezal replies that her father did not attend the ceremony because he has bone cancer (which itself might be a lie). The reporter then presents Dolezal with an off-camera photo of her father, which leads to the following exchange:
Reporter: Is that your dad?
Dolezal: Yeah. That’s... that’s my dad.
Reporter: This man right here is your father? Right there?
Dolezal: Do you have a question about that?
Reporter: Yes, ma’am. I was wondering if, uh, your dad really is an African American man?
Dolezal: That’s a very—I mean, I don’t know what you’re implying.
Reporter: Are you African American?
Dolezal: I don’t... I don’t understand the question of—I did tell you that yes that’s my dad. And he was unable to come in January.
Reporter: Are your parents—are they white?
Dolezal: [Walking away] I refuse...
This is what it looks like when you realize that your decade-long con of pretending to be a black woman is finally going up in smoke.
