It may be simple to Rachel Dolezal — “I identify as black” — but a lot of people aren’t buying it.
Her live interview on TODAY on Tuesday — her first since resigning as president of a local NAACP chapter after she was accused of pretending to be black — drew confusion and even outrage online.
Dolezal told Matt Lauer that the furor around her racial identification “is really about what it is to be human.”
“I hope that that can drive at the core of definitions of race, ethnicity, culture, self determination, personal agency and, ultimately, empowerment,” she said.
She also said that, from childhood, “I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon.”
The interview ignited discussion in the TODAY Orange Room.
The chaplain of a New York college took the occasion to post Langston Hughes:
Some people sought to draw a distinction between the controversy and the work Dolezal did as president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington.