Rachel Dolezal Is Being Featured In Documentary About Black Beauty: White Women Are Angry Because I Did What They Never Would
Rachel Dolezal Is Being Featured In Documentary About Black Beauty: White Women Are Angry Because I Did What They Never Would
Rachel Dolezal’s time in the spotlight is picking back up after she was exposed for pretending to be black six years ago.
Rachel Dolezal, who once served as the president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, was outed by her parents in 2015. Despite the backlash she’s received, Rachel Dolezal insisted that she identifies as a black woman.
Now, she’s slated to appear in a documentary about black beauty.
The project, titled Subjects of Desire, is directed by Jennifer Holness and will premiere at SXSW later this week.
In the docu, Rachel Dolezal discusses how she’s afraid of white men and has been obligated to fit the “white mold.”
Holness said including Rachel Dolezal in the project was a must, and wasn’t just for shock. She told The Daily Beast,
“It wasn’t a commercial thought. It wasn’t like I thought, ‘…If I put her in, it’ll be controversial!’ No, not at all. I’m doing a film on Black women and beauty and this is the first time that I’ve come across a white woman pretending to be Black for 10 years when there wasn’t a massive financial benefit.”
She added,
“The standard of beauty historically has been white and that has been protected and upheld, so as someone who has that standard, she’s blonde with freckles and green eyes and stepped away from that, there’s something there.”
She continued and said while she doesn’t think Dolezal’s actions weren’t without blame, Dolezal is still living her life as a black woman.
Dolezal spoke on her experience and said in the documentary,
“I would say since then [I’ve had] just shaming and ridicule. I’ve been called an insult to white women and an insult to Black women. White women are angry because I did what they never would do and went further, like I put 110. I didn’t just be that white ally and do a little bit, I canceled my white privilege. I canceled my hair. For Black women, I feel like it’s a reaction to pain. It’s like a trigger to post-traumatic stress.”
She went on to say,
“When it comes to white men, that’s the group that I am the most scared of on a level of threat because that’s mostly the white supremacy folks.”
She said her first husband, who is black, was one of the people who wanted her to fit into what she called a “white mold”, making her feel “repressed.”
“He would make comments about how no white woman has that kind of butt, you need to get a respectable white butt.”
Along with losing her position in the NAACP, Dolezal was fired from her position as an adjunct instructor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University. She told Tamron Hall earlier this year that she braids hair to make money.
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