Rachel Dolezal

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

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.

Everybody's life matters. But that's why we have to say black lives matter, because the highest disproportionality, police brutality, disenfranchisement, education disproportionality in school discipline, curriculum, misrepresentation, all of this.

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

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

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.

You can't just say in one sentence what is blackness or what is black culture or what makes you who you are.

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.

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.

I really feel like there have been moments of some level of creative nonfiction. I have kind of had to explain or justify some of the timeline and logistics of my life in a way that made sense to others.

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.