Rachel Dolezal sat down with Today‘s Matt Lauer to address the controversy over deceiving people about her racial background, just one day after resigning as president of the Spokane NAACP. Lauer asked the tough questions everyone has been pondering since news broke of Dolezal’s deception. She, however, failed to give any straight answers and transferred blame throughout the interview.
Lauer jumped right in with the question of Dolezal’s race. “Let me just ask you the question in simple terms again, because you’ve sent mixed signals over the years. Are you an African-American woman?” Lauer asked.
“I identify as Black,” Dolezal stated.
“You identify as Black. Let me put up a picture of you in the early-20s. Is this an African-American woman, or a Caucasian woman?” Lauer asked.
Dolezal went on to say that she has self-identified with the “Black experience” since she was very young and began coloring her self-portraits with a brown crayon instead of a peach one.
Then, Lauer asked when she began lying about her race. She doesn’t exactly answer the question, but says that news publications began identifying her as transracial, then biracial, and finally as a Black woman, and she didn’t correct them.
That’s when Lauer brought up the criticism that has plagued Dolezal since she was outed. “You didn’t correct those reports because they worked for you. They helped you meet your goals.”
And she didn’t deny using her “Blackness” for her gain.
The interview, then, focused on whether Dolezal had purposely changed her appearance from fair with blonde hair to medium-toned with kinky hair. Lauer referred to the idea of Dolezal putting on darker makeup to make her skin look darker as blackface.
“I have a huge issue with blackface. This is not some freak Birth of a Nation mockery blackface performance,” said the woman obviously wearing darker makeup on live TV.
Lauer even asked how Dolezal could sue Howard University for discriminating against her as a white woman, if she identified as Black. She barely addressed the contradiction and said that losing her scholarship was an injustice.
When asked whether she would change any of her actions, Dolezal said, “As much as this discussion has somewhat been at my expense recently, and in a very sort of viciously inhumane way, come out of the woodwork, the discussion is really about what it is to be human,” she said. “I hope that that can drive at the core of definitions of race, ethnicity, culture, self-determination, personal agency, and, ultimately, empowerment.”
“But when you say you would make the same choices, wouldn’t you go back and be a little more transparent about certain things in your life, or correct certain things you knew were incorrect?” Lauer asked.
“There are probably a couple of interviews I would do different in retrospect. But overall my life has been one of survival and the decisions I’ve made along the way, including my identification, have been to survive and to, you know, carry forward in my journey,” Dolezel stated.
To conclude the interview, Lauer asked whether she would have been as successful with the NAACP as a white woman.
“I don’t know. I guess I haven’t had the opportunity to experience that in those shoes. I’m not sure,” Dolezal replied.