Top 35 Rachel Dolezal Quotes

I don’t think you can do something wrong with your identity if you’re living in your authenticity.

About five years old, I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon and, you know, the black curly hair. That’s how I was portraying myself.

I want to provide for my kids.

Have I had experiences by other people identifying me as black and behaving towards me as black? Yes. Just for as long as maybe somebody who was born categorised as black? No.

What I believe about race is that race is not real. It’s not a biological reality. It’s a hierarchical system that was created to leverage power and privilege between different groups of people.

I was presented as a con and a fraud and a liar. I think some of the treatment was pretty cruel.

I would pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo… imagining I was a different person living in a different place was one of the few ways… that I could escape the oppressive environment I was raised in.

I think some people feel that if you question the reality of race, you’re questioning racism; you’re saying racism isn’t real. Racism is real because people actually believe race is real. We’d have to really let go of the 500-year-old idea of race as a worldview in order to undo racism.

I am part of the pan-African diaspora.

I think that, in America, even though race is a social construct, I mean, we say this in theory, but I think a lot of people don’t believe that it really is. And so it’s still a very racialized society.

I was not born in a teepee – that I know of. I actually don’t know where I was born.

I definitely feel like, in America, even though race is a social construct… there’s still a line drawn in the sand; there still are sides. Politically, there’s a black side and a white side, and I stand unapologetically on the black side.

From a very young age, I felt a spiritual, visceral, instinctual connection with ‘black is beautiful.’ Just the black experience and wanting to celebrate that. And I didn’t know how to articulate that as a young child.

Overall, my life has been one of survival, and the decisions that I have made along the way, including my identification, have been to survive.

I don’t believe in reverse racism. I really don’t.

I certainly don’t stay out of the sun, and I also don’t, as some of my critics have said, put on blackface as a performance.

My life is not a sound bite.

As long as I can remember, I saw myself as black. I was socially conditioned to discard that. It was an all-white town. I was very unhappy. I felt like I was constantly self-sabotaging in order to conform to religion, culture dynamics. I was censoring myself. I was shutting down inside.

I wish Americans understood that race is a social construct, even if we don’t want it to be.

People didn’t seem able to consider that maybe both were true. OK, I was born to white parents, but maybe I had an authentic black identity.

In the Dolezal family, you couldn’t always count on your parents to keep you safe.

I’m this generic, ambiguous scapegoat for white people to call me a race traitor and take out their hostility on. And I’m a target for anger and pain about white people from the black community. It’s like I am the worst of all these worlds.

I’ve never been fully transparent or an open book, even to those you’d call close friends.

Blackness better defines who I am philosophically and socially than whiteness does.

I really just prefer to be exactly who I am, and black is really the closest race and cultural category that represents the essence of who I am.

I do wish I could have given myself permission to really name and own the me of me earlier in life.

Any man can be a father; not any man can be a dad.

If people feel misled or deceived, then sorry that they feel that way, but I believe that’s more due to their definition and construct of race in their own minds than it is to my integrity or honesty, because I wouldn’t say I’m African American, but I would say I’m black, and there’s a difference in those terms.

I stand on the black side of issues, philosophically, politically, socially, and for me to not check that box, I felt like, would be some sort of betrayal of not only who I am but also the community I affiliate with.

I did work and bought all my own clothes and shoes since I was 9 years old. That’s not a typical American childhood life.

In order to really move toward what people really think of as some sort of Utopian post-racial society or somehow to really challenge the racial hierarchy, we’re going to have to allow some fluidity.

I’m more black than I am white. That’s the accurate answer from my truth.

I felt very isolated with my identity virtually my entire life, that nobody really got it and that I didn’t really have the personal agency to express it.

The system of racial classification is fiction, and we need to thoughtfully evaluate whether perpetuating it rigidly or allowing fluidity across the spectrum best supports human rights and social justice.

Nothing about being white describes who I am.