Broke, pregnant Rachel Dolezal shows off her strange home
Rachel Dolezal — the embattled Africana studies professor and NAACP chapter president, who had a hilarious crash-and-burn entry onto the national stage this year after being outed as white — is quite the odd bird.
Without getting into too much detail, her argument for her transracial identity (“I identify as black,” she’s said in the press) has been fully mocked; “cultural appropriator” and “blackface performer” are just some names that have deservedly been thrown her way since making her explosive debut in June.
She lost her teaching job, resigned from her role at the NAACP, no longer has as many friends and can only find part-time work doing black women’s hair. Pregnant and broke, her life must truly suck.
Still, Dolezal managed to crawl out of her hole and bask in the limelight. In a top-notch profile published yesterday by Vice’s Broadly, some seriously strange new details emerge: notably, those of her home in Spokane, Washington. Broadly got to hang out there with her.
The writer refers to her two-bedroom house as pretty, but with a woman as kooky as Dolezal living behind its doors, you can justifiably imagine it’s got some weird stuffinside.
She’s decorated the place with her own artwork: There’s a portrait of Spike Lee’s character Pariah, the protagonist of the 2011 film of the same name, hanging over her fireplace. And, for some reason, there’s a drawing of the Ku Klux Klan chasing down a black girl above her bed. Maybe art is therapeutic for dealing with her cruel reality?
She draws with pastels in what appears to be a small kitchen and has an art studio in her basement — near where her teenage son, Franklin, sleeps. In a semblance of normalcy, she decorates the front steps of the home with pumpkins in the fall.
In photo albums, there’s a picture of the teepee where she says she was born; same goes for the document she says is her original birth certificate, which claims Jesus Christ was the doctor who oversaw the birth.
She’s expecting a baby, whom she’ll name Langston after poet and activist Langston Hughes; she has ultrasound images cut out into heart shapes and a room already saved for him — the one where her adopted son Izaiah lived before heading off to college.
“Life hasn’t been easy for me at all, but I keep going,” she tells Broadly. “I’m still climbing, so you don’t sit down and stop. You keep going, and I want that to be a lesson for all my sons.”
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