Rachel Dolezal making the talk show rounds
Jun 17, 2015, 9:37 AM | Updated: 9:54 am
(AP)
Rachel Dolezal continues to dominate headlines and Twitter conversations.
She was unapologetic in her “Today” show interview on Tuesday — which she was not paid for, according to NBC — proclaiming she identifies as black.
“This is not some freak, birth of a nation, mockery blackface performance,” she told Matt Lauer.
Dolezal doubled down on those claims Tuesday night on “NBC Nightly News.”
You might remember it was Dolezal’s parents who outed her as white because they want her to be honest about her life.
Well, Dolezal told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie she’s not even sure her parents are her parents.
“I know who raised me,” she told Guthrie. “I haven’t had a DNA test. There’s been no biological proof that Larry and Ruthanne are my biological parents. There’s a birth certificate with their names on it. I’m not necessarily saying that I can’t prove they’re not, but I don’t know that I can actually prove they are. The birth certificate is issued a month and half after I’m born. There were certainly no medical witnesses to my birth.”
“It’s one thing to embrace the questions as an academic matter,” Guthrie said. “It’s another thing to just actually be honest and transparent about who you are.”
“Right. Well, I’m definitely not white,” Dolezal said.
To which her parents told KXLY-TV in Spokane, “ouch.”
“Aspects of it are very hurtful, deeply hurtful. Hopefully, at some point in time, we’ll be able to reconcile, forgive, have some healing in our family and move forward,” Larry Dolezal said.
Dolezal also appeared on the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC.
Harris-Perry, who is mixed race, had some pretty pressing questions for Dolezal dealing with appropriating black culture.
“One of my producers was like, ‘I can do all of this. I can stretch. I can try to think about racial identity in this more socially-constructed way, but I cannot with the hair. Because hair goes to this – even if race is not biological – the experience of being a little black girl and dealing with the physiological realities of the difficulty of black hair … man, they feel like core pain.’ So talk to me about your hair, your hair choices, and also the ways in which you’ve talked and discussed the relationship of black hair. ”
“Yeah, well, my hair journey has been interesting,” Dolezal said. “Um, certainly I’ve gotten the whole TSA ‘Yeah, but there’s so much of it so we have to search it.’ Whether it’s the twist out, the dreads.”
“Literally, my producer said to me, and I want you to address this, she says every time that happens to her and the TSA and her hair, she feels deeply and profoundly violated,” Harris-Perry said. “She said she probably likes it because it confirms her black, racial identity.”
‘Hell no, hell no,” Dolezal replied. “Get your hands out of my hair. No, no.”
Aside from the racial aspects of Dolezal’s story, she is under investigation by the city of Spokane.
The ethics committee is looking into whether she violated the city’s ethics code because she sits on a citizens’ police oversight committee.
A councilmember and police officer who interviewed Dolezal for the committee appointment told The Spokesman Review they feel “misled” by her.
KIRO Radio’s Colleen O’Brien contributed to this report.