Quotes from Rachel Dolezal

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

It's a painful thing to talk about my childhood. I kind of don't talk about it much.

Race is such a contentious issue because of the painful history of racism. Race didn't create racism, but racism created race.

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

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

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.

There's no such thing as racial, non-white supremacy.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'm bisexual. And so, you know, I've dated men and women.

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 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 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 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 identify as black.

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.

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.