From the Spokesman-Review:
Rachel Dolezal, a woman who rose to prominence as a black civil rights leader then lost her job when her parents exposed her as white is struggling to make a living these days.
Dolezal said she has been unable to find steady work in the nearly two years since she was outed as a white woman in local media reports, and she is uncertain about her future.
“I was presented as a con and a fraud and a liar,” Dolezal, 40, told the Associated Press this week. “I think some of the treatment was pretty cruel.”
But wasn’t she a fraud and liar, conning society?
She still identifies as black, and looks black, despite being “Caucasian biologically.”
“People didn’t seem able to consider that maybe both were true,” she said. “OK, I was born to white parents, but maybe I had an authentic black identity.”
Dolezal had blond hair and freckles while growing up near Troy, Montana, with religious parents. She says she began to change her perspective as a teenager, after her parents adopted four black children. Dolezal decided to become publicly black years later, after getting divorced.
The ruse worked for years until 2015 when her parents, with whom she has long feuded, told local reporters their daughter was born white but was presenting herself as a black activist in the Spokane region, an area with few minorities.
The story became an international sensation, and Dolezal lost the various jobs by which she pieced together a modest living for her family.