In Full Color

by Rachel Dolezal

  As thrilled as they were to be staying at a five-star hotel, I barely noticed all the plush amenities. My body was numb from lack of sleep, exhaustion, and the emotional overload I’d endured in the past few days. Taking a long hot bath has always been my religion, and at that point all I could think about was the deep marble bathtub with the fancy bottle of body wash and bouquet of fresh-cut flowers sitting on the edge. I managed to get Franklin calmed down enough to allow me to melt into the tub, where I hoped to soak away my anxiety and think about what sort of answers I might give to all the questions I expected to be asked in the morning.

  The bath didn’t last long enough. When I got out, I only had five hours until I was supposed to wake up and find the town car that would be taking me to NBC Studios at Rockefeller Center. All I wanted to do was get some much-needed sleep, but when I opened the bathroom door I saw that Franklin had passed out on the bed with candy wrappers all around him and at such an angle it precluded me from slipping in beside him. I had to make do with crashing on the cot instead.

  I woke up at 4 AM with a sharp cramp in my side. I hadn’t slept well or much, but I needed to find out if Siobhan and Malique had arrived safely. The text she’d left on my phone confirmed that they had. Groggy but awake, I ironed my suit, rousted Franklin, and led him down to the lobby, where we rendezvoused with Izaiah, Siobhan, and Malique. We arrived at NBC at 6:15 AM, and I was immediately whisked into hair and makeup, where the lights were much too bright for the time of day. A staff person fetched coffee. Giselle introduced me to a bunch of people whose names I would never remember. I nodded and smiled and continued to think about how I wanted to respond when asked about working for the NAACP and the OPOC and fighting for racial justice.

  After I’d taken a seat opposite Matt Lauer on the Today Show, it quickly became apparent that he had little interest in talking about any of these issues. I was frustrated at the direction he took. Many of his questions seemed downright bizarre to me at the time. He wanted to know what I did to change my appearance, as if I’d taken some drug as the author of Black Like Me had done instead of merely enjoying lots of sunshine, styling my hair, and opening my mind. That my hands and Matt’s hands were very nearly the same complexion highlighted the question’s absurdity for me. I wondered why he was asking me if I did something to darken my complexion when he clearly lounged on the beach, laid in a tanning bed, or had some kind of melanated heritage.

  The question of whether I’ve ever altered my appearance to look Black bothered me because, like most women, I wanted to feel beautiful when I looked in the mirror, and how I did my hair and makeup and treated my skin was a personal decision. Many women surgically alter their bodies in ways that make them look different from how they were born. They get brow lifts, nose jobs, tummy tucks, booty shots, breast implants, and lip augmentations and reductions. Two months before I appeared on Today, Candice Bergen sat in the same seat I was now in and explained to Matt how she’d gotten her eyes “done” when she was forty-one and, a year later, some bands under her neck, but no one vilified her behavior.

  Plastic surgeons are even capable of changing someone’s “racial appearance” by performing something called race reassignment surgery. After having his skin bleached, his nose reshaped, his lips thinned, and his hair straightened, Michael Jackson became the best-known recipient of this medical procedure, and more recently, Lil’ Kim had similar work done. The rapidly increasing popularity of such surgeries raises some interesting questions: Is one’s racial appearance a proprietary entity? If so, who owns the brand? What does wanting to get this surgery say about the people who do it? Are the people who criticize such surgery right or wrong? What does the procedure say about the social construct of race in general? And is it fair that only those with enough resources can access these procedures?

  I’ve never had any surgeries or alterations done to change my appearance. I didn’t do any intensive makeup contouring. I’m a low-budget, low-maintenance woman. I liked to get a tan and occasionally used bronzer and I spent a lot of time on my hair, and with my somewhat broad nose, somewhat full lips, and somewhat curvy figure, that was enough to push the public’s perception of me from white girl to “mixed chick.”

  Matt’s interest in my appearance seemed to be shared by just about everyone. I tried to be understanding when people attempted to turn the modest choices I’ve made to beautify my appearance into a big deal, but at the end of the day I preferred to keep my morning routine private and devote my energy to talking about more serious issues. Why not say all this on camera? Because I was overwhelmed and exhausted, my brain was shutting down from being besieged by the media five days in a row, and I wasn’t prepped in advance about what I might be asked. It’s much easier to answer questions when you’ve had a little time to reflect on them.

  I wasn’t happy about how the interview was going, but I knew being rude to Matt wouldn’t help my cause. I answered his questions with as much accuracy and respect as I could muster, and before I knew it the interview was over. There was no time for me to take stock of what had just transpired. I was immediately moved to another room, where I was told I would be interviewed by Savannah Guthrie for the nightly news. This interview would be much longer than the previous one, but it would be friendly—that’s the only prep I got. I felt like I’d been placed on a balance beam and told to perform some amazing gymnastics routine I’d never been trained to do. I knew the odds of this turning out well were slim.

  When Savannah brought up the interviews Ezra, Zach, Larry, and Ruthanne had done, it triggered my PTSD, and I scrambled to find my breath and my patience. I didn’t think it was fair that in her line of questioning there was nothing about who I really was or the work I’d done. It was becoming clear to me just how little these mainstream white reporters knew about the idea and history of race. I began to wonder if breaking my silence on national television was the best plan after all. I fantasized about interviewing Savannah about her whiteness. How much time did she spend on her hair? How did she choose the right color of lipstick for her complexion and ultra-thin lips? Had she considered the history of how white people had come to be called white? But, of course, I couldn’t ask these questions. I was the one on trial here, not her. I wanted to model respect and humility, so I forced myself to concentrate and try to make sense of all the odd questions coming my way.

  Noticing how hard this interview was on me, Izaiah and Franklin hugged me afterward, and Franklin insisted he wanted to say something on camera. I was opposed to it at first but relented when he wouldn’t drop it. I told the producer that I would allow him to do it on one condition: they needed to make it clear that it was Franklin’s idea. Franklin took a seat on the couch, tugged on his sleeves, and said the kindest words I’d heard in what felt like a really long time. “I always knew my mom was going to be world-famous. But not like this. She doesn’t deserve to be remembered as a liar, but as a hero.” Izaiah and I both had tears in our eyes.

  Franklin went on to talk about how he’d witnessed some of the hate crimes, how I wasn’t making anything up, and how much it upset him that people thought that I had, but none of that made it onto the air. However brief Franklin’s appearance on television was, it was long enough to attract the attention of some cowardly bullies, who harassed him on social media and, more alarmingly, on his cell phone, for “being a bitch.” The next day, he received a text that read, “Tell your mom to kill herself and do the world a favor.”

  After the interview with Savannah, I was given ten minutes in the green room to refocus and prepare for my interview with Melissa Harris-Perry. When Melissa came to see me, we chatted for a bit. I’d chosen to do these exclusive interviews with NBC so I could speak with her, and I wasn’t disappointed. We talked about the fluidity of identity and how power and privilege had created the current worldview about race. She told me she didn’t understand why people were so upset about my identity. She even shared a story with me about her second daughter being identified as white
at birth after being born via a surrogate who was white. “We thought about just leaving it that way,” she said, describing the attitude she and her husband had adopted while pondering their daughter’s legal racial classification.

  After Melissa and I briefly discussed what she wanted to talk about during our segment, we were mic’d up and on set in no time. I felt much more at ease with her than I did with Matt or Savannah. I liked that she emphasized that my NAACP and OPOC positions were unpaid, but I was a little dismayed when many of her questions covered the same ground I’d already talked about in the previous interviews. At times, I felt like I was just repeating myself for the third time that morning. I hoped we could move on to a more academic discussion. We touched on a few interesting subjects, such as race, gender, and identity, but we didn’t have a thorough discussion of any of these topics. In the end, it wasn’t quite the synergy-filled conversation I’d envisioned.

  I was told the fourth interview I would be doing was going to air on MSNBC-BLK, which focused on Black issues and targeted millennials. I went in with the hopeful idea that it might be like having a conversation with my students, but it was just more of the same. As I took a seat on an uncomfortable stool, an animated light-skinned Black woman named Amber Payne started asking me questions. I noticed that we were nearly the same complexion and her hair wasn’t all that much different than mine, falling in a loose, wavy pattern with very little curl. If she’d run a flat-iron down her hair, she could have easily passed for Italian. Surely with her ethnically indeterminate appearance she would be a bit more understanding, I thought. After all, most of those who had reached out to me to express their support were people stuck somewhere in the middle of Black and white. Darker Black women, on the other hand, had become one of the primary voices of opposition against me, calling the way I identified “the ultimate white privilege.”

  In this instance, however, Amber, who was light-skinned, was taking the voice of the darker sistas, over-representing to underscore that she was solidly Black and not like Raven-Symoné, the Black actress/singer/comedian/talk show host who once said on her show The View that she would never hire someone who had a “ghetto name,” or Stacey Dash, the Black actress/talk show host/Republican, who has called Black Lives Matter a terrorist group and wants to abolish Black History Month and Black Entertainment Television.

  Amber’s questions were adversarial and oppositional. I was frustrated and tired by now but tried not to show it. I let her lead the conversation and did my best to be patient—even though her attacks came at my expense. The only time I got visibly irritated occurred when she asked if I was “willing to acknowledge that level of white privilege that you took in choosing to be Black.” She obviously didn’t get it.

  “So you do acknowledge that you have that ability to shift?” she went on to ask. “Because that’s what really frustrates a lot of people. That’s the heart of it. People in the Black community, that’s what makes them angry because we can’t do that.” She seemed to have forgotten the long history of lighter-skinned Black people doing exactly that* and couldn’t wrap her head around the idea that I wasn’t passing for something I wasn’t but identifying as something I was.

  When she wasn’t attacking me, she was patronizing me. “How do you do your hair?” she asked at one point. “Is it a perm? Is it a weave? Everybody’s asking.” Groundbreaking journalism this was not.

  The interview was supposed to last thirty minutes, but it felt like three days in a bus station. I told the crew I needed to be done. I didn’t even know what time it was. All I knew was that I was exhausted and famished and that my kids and Siobhan and Malique must have felt the same way. A photographer told me he just needed to take a few photos of me for their website and then I could go. I tried to smile for the camera, but as I forced my mouth to turn upward I broke down and cried.

  We spent two more nights in New York and Franklin and Izaiah were able to cross every item off their sightseeing wish list except visiting the Statue of Liberty. After all they’d seen and done, Franklin and Izaiah went home feeling like they’d had an amazing vacation. I, on the other hand, limped home feeling completely wiped out, emotionally and physically. I didn’t need any more drama in my life but received some anyway. My period was a week late. The optimistic response would have been to chalk it up to stress and hope it arrived soon. I chose the more realistic route and called the man with whom I’d recently had a fling and asked him if he’d go to the store and get a pregnancy test for me. He did, then picked me up and took me to his apartment, where I took the test. Squatting over the toilet, I peed on the stick and watched the two red lines emerge, indicating it was positive. Unconvinced, I then used the second stick in the box. It also came back positive.

  Damn, I was pregnant.

  *Darker-skinned Black women obviously don’t have that choice.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Backlash

  THAT I COULD EVEN GET PREGNANT was something of a surprise. During an OBGYN visit just after I’d gotten divorced in 2007, a Pap smear had shown the presence of abnormal cells in my cervix. A month later, I got another one done, and the result was the same: positive, which in this case meant very bad. A biopsy confirmed what no one ever wants to hear: I had cancer.

  When you have something growing in your body that might kill you, you want to get it out as soon as possible, so the wait for the surgery to remove it, known as a LEEP procedure, seemed to take forever. The operation itself produced just as much anxiety, as it involved having a bit of my cervix cut out with an electric wire. As I laid back with my feet in the stirrups, the doctor cranked open my vagina with a speculum and assured me that everything was going to be fine.

  It wasn’t. As soon as the wire touched my flesh, I felt a searing pain unlike any I’d ever experienced before. Smoke poured out of my vagina. The room smelled like burning flesh. Evidently, the nurse had set the voltage on the machine too high. While she was being dismissed and replaced with a new one, my fingernails dug into the sides of the operating table and my teeth sunk into my bottom lip as I dealt with the excruciating pain and prepared for round two. The doctor did the procedure correctly on her next attempt, but my next Pap smear, done three months later, still came back positive.

  Over the course of my next several visits to the doctor, more and more of my cervix was removed through various surgical procedures, and yet the tests still showed the presence of cancerous cells. After my last surgery, the results finally came back negative—but in the process most of my cervix had been cut away. The cervix regenerates over time, but I still didn’t know if I would ever be able to get pregnant. I was also told that if I did get pregnant the chances of my miscarrying (and being subjected to life-threatening health risks such as excess hemorrhaging) would escalate unless I got a cervical cerclage, a procedure that involves having your cervix sewn shut.

  Since the final surgery, I’d managed to get pregnant twice, and both times I opted to have an abortion. After my divorce from Kevin, the pro-lifer I was brainwashed to be as a child died and was replaced by a free-thinking pro-choice advocate. As in so many other aspects of my life, I’d come to understand that things are rarely so clear-cut and that the reasons for making a decision sometimes are as important as the decision itself. As before, there were many valid reasons to terminate the pregnancy this time around. The medical risk I faced if I were to try to have a baby was just one of them. The soaring levels of stress I had from being thrown into a global media firestorm also didn’t promise to mix well with the hormonal challenges of pregnancy. That I no longer had any income had to be considered, too.

  The father thought that we should get married or that I should have an abortion. The first option was a nonstarter. I didn’t feel that we knew each other well enough or were compatible enough to get married—or even continue our romantic involvement, for that matter. He didn’t take it very well when I made it clear that I was happy just being friends with him. The second option, abortion, made much more
sense, especially after the father began saying that he didn’t know for sure if the baby was even his, even though it was clear from the timing of the pregnancy and the size of the fetus that no one else was in the running.

  Even though getting an abortion made the most sense, I took a moment to consider my options. Just because I supported a woman’s right to choose didn’t mean I took the decision lightly. With all the chaos in my life, I felt like it was important for me to give it my full attention and think it through. It would have been easy to make a rash decision, given all the distractions and pressure I faced. I continued to get pummeled with emails and texts directing other people’s negativity onto me. Many of them began, “You’re a pathetic cunt nigger,” or some variation of the same. I deleted these messages without reading any further and changed my cell phone number, but I couldn’t control what appeared in the media or on the internet and couldn’t completely shield my kids from the fallout. Given all the negativity being directed at me, bringing another child into the world and exposing it to that hate and suffering didn’t seem like such a good idea.

  Thankfully, amidst all the gray clouds, there were some rays of sunshine. On June 12, Black R&B singer Keri Hilson took to Twitter to express her much appreciated—albeit somewhat backhanded—support of me. “Let’s just all thank #RachelDolezal,” she wrote. “Identity, pathological, & parental issues aside, she’s doing more than most of us do for ourselves.”

  Another person who seemed to get me—or who was at least willing to give me the benefit of the doubt—was the comedian Dave Chappelle. “The thing that the media’s got to be real careful about, that they’re kind of overlooking, is the emotional content of what [Rachel Doležal] means,” he told Soraya Nadia McDonald of the Washington Post on June 14. “There’s something that’s very nuanced where she’s highlighting the difference between personal feeling and what’s construct as far as racism is concerned. I don’t know what her agenda is, but there’s an emotional context for Black people when they see her and white people when they see her. There’s a lot of feelings that are going to come out behind what’s happening with this lady.”