Rachel Dolezal Still Says She’s Black, and Now She Does Hair Weaves and Braids After Losing Jobs

Rachel Dolezal and her box braids have turned their 15 minutes of fame into 17 minutes after a new interview with Vanity Fair. As my colleague Danielle Belton puts it, “Vanity Fair never interviews black people, so they found a fake one?”

Dolezal’s interview includes tons of trans-rachel tears. Dolezal’s life after resigning from the Spokane, Wash., NAACP chapter hasn’t been a crystal stair. In addition to losing that job, she did not renew her professor’s contract at Eastern Washington University, where she taught classes on things like black-hair politics.

But that experience teaching about black-hair politics is now helping her.

Dolezal is now a beautician, and she told Vanity Fair that she now makes her living braiding and weaving black hair. Dolezal told the website that she has about three appointments a week, and the money is filling in a gap after she lost her previous jobs.

Dolezal also still states that she’s black—even though she was born to two white parents.

“It’s not a costume,” Dolezal says. “I don’t know spiritually and metaphysically how this goes, but I do know that from my earliest memories I have awareness and connection with the black experience, and that’s never left me. It’s not something that I can put on and take off anymore. Like I said, I’ve had my years of confusion and wondering who I really [was] and why and how do I live my life and make sense of it all, but I’m not confused about that any longer. I think the world might be—but I’m not.”

On top of braiding and weaving, Dolezal hopes that eventually her experience will garner her a book deal so she can finally tell her side of the story, which will probably include her time as a white woman at Howard University before she decided to change her background. Never mind that real black women have to jump through hoops just to get a book agent and publishing company to give them the time of day.

I only wish Dolezal the best, and hope that one day she realizes that she can actually be a white woman who wears box braids and loves black culture, without being a white woman who wears box braids and loves black culture and lies about being black.