Yesterday we heard from Rachel Dolezal, the former Spokane, WA NAACP president who posed as an African American woman for years. Dolezal used a combination of self tanners, fake hair and an invented backstory, complete with made up racist bigotry, to boost the claim that she was born as a black woman. She even claimed that a black man, a personal friend, was her biological father, when her father is in fact white, as is her mother. There’s more to this complicated story, with the crux being that the woman lies openly and seems to have sociopathic tendencies.

In her appearance on The Today Show yesterday, Dolezal portrayed herself as a victim of the media. She had a lot of long winded explanations and never apologized for her deception, nor did she apologize in her statement resigning from the NAACP. Dolezal had another, more in-depth interview yesterday, with Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC. She talked a good game, as we heard on The Today Show, but she rarely answered questions directly and instead gave lots of details which sounded embellished. You can read a transcript of the interview here and clips are here.

I’m not going to excerpt much from the interview, because to me it’s not what she said it’s what she didn’t say. She was entirely too slick, and I came away from this with the impression that she’s a charismatic con artist. Here’s Dolezal’s response to the questions of whether she’s a con artist. She didn’t sweat it at all, nor did she answer yes or no. She also talked around the issue of cultural appropriation, bringing it up without really addressing it.

On if she’s a con artist
I don’t think so, you know. I don’t think anything that I have done with regard to the movement, my work, my life, my identity, I mean, it’s all been very thoughtful and careful, sometimes decisions have been made for survival reasons or to protect people that I love. And all things included, when it boils down, the entire world could say stand down. But when it comes to being there for my kids, for my sister, I would never stand down on that.

It’s been hard for me to actually have the courage to be there for myself because my life and kind of my past, my journey, has been to be so heavily aware of the needs of other people in times to organize, strategize and advocate for and protect those interests. And so at this point, I’m kind of thrust into, you know, are you going to be there for yourself? Are you not? Are you going to back down, you know, stand down, stand up, what’s going to happen? And I’ve really kind of taken the personal and the organizational and in the last three days –

– OK. Here’s family, kids, NAACP, accountability, my students, all these things, my work. And here’s my family and here’s my — and then there’s me.

And what is in the big picture interest? And so my resignation yesterday, I really came to see that and I came from ultimately conversation with my oldest son, which, you know, he’s like (INAUDIBLE), I can’t — like now’s the time when.

On people being angry at her
They don’t know me. They really don’t know what I’ve actually walked through and how hard it is. This has not been something that just is a casual, you know come-and-go sort of identity you know, or an identity crisis. It’s something that I’ve paid away. And people have asked like, you know, I guess, go back to being white.

If you’re rejected by the black community, what do you do?

I’ll be me. I’ll be me because you know, I feel like at the same time, I never want to be a liability to the cause. And I take that very seriously in consideration there’s so much to process with sort of going from being celebrated as a black woman and loving how that feels by all the students that I mentor and like feeling like, oh, I can be me and they get me and I get them and we can talk about, you know, yes, you know, just Iggy Azalea and cultural appropriation and all these things. And it’s just — I teach (INAUDIBLE) culture classes, I teach black studies. I teach like seven of them.

[From MSNBC Transcript]

It’s a simple question: are you a con artist or not? The answer should be “yes” or “no”. Instead she claims that she doesn’t “think” she is and then goes into a long non-answer about how she’s “there for” her family and her job. It’s unclear what she even means, which seems to be typical of the way she speaks. She had a similar lengthy non-response to the question of why she sued Howard University.

Also in the interview, Dolezal claimed that she didn’t get paid for her position with the NAACP or for her role on the police accountability board. She also worked as a part time instructor for Eastern Washington University, which has since removed her profile from their website. It’s thought that her contract for next year will not be renewed.

Dolezal may have another option for employment now that she’s infamous for pretending to be a black woman. Radar online reports that she’s been offered at least two reality shows and is about to hire a publicist and agent. TLC should get right on that. I’ve heard they may have an opening in their schedule.