I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see the Rachel Dolezal interview on the Today Show with Matt Lauer this morning. I learned she was going to be interviewed by three reporters for three branches of the network. That set off alarm bells in my head because if she was scheduled for three different interviews I wondered how aggressive the reporters would be to dig into the story. My other concern, with so many other questions brought up that had nothing to do with the particulars of the story, would the interviews veer into the false flag issues.

I saw the interview was posted on the Today Show website an hour before it was to air in my time zone, so I decided to do something a bit different. I decided to watch the interview and pause as I needed to comment on remarks said. I might be a little bit of a heckler in the comments -

She keeps saying her ethnicity is complex but never explains why. They spent a lot of time dancing around what is black and white, which in my opinion didn’t need to happen. She knew she was going to be on national television. She had a pretty good idea what the questions might be, either because a producer did a pre interview or by the comments that have been made this past weekend in all kinds of social media and mainstream media circles. When he asked if she was an African American woman she said she identified as black. When a picture was shown of her at a young age, she said she was 16, again she went for the lawyer answer (I noticed she has done that a lot in interviews) and said people looking at her would say she is Caucasian. She did admit when pressed again that she was not identifying herself as black at the time of the picture.

Ok now you’re getting silly! Less than a minute ago in the interview you had a picture at 16 where you said you identified as white. Now you claim the parents are trying to ‘whitewash’ (your word) the progress you have done over the years. Then you said you had a self-identification with the black experience when you were five. You consider self-identification with the black experience because you did self-portraits of yourself with brown skin and black curly hair? There is something I’m hearing and I can’t really . . . it’s hard to put into words but to me how she is plotting out her early experiences, it’s very textbook in a gender/sexual orientation kind of way. If you hear stories about the early experiences of homosexual youth or transgenders, you hear that very early on they knew of themselves. Right now my gut tells me she’s using a false template.

We hit another evasive answer from Dolezal. She was asked when she started deceiving people about her race. Breaking down her answer, she claims she never deceived people. They made assumptions and she didn’t correct them. She said that local papers in Idaho, she went there for human rights work, started off by calling her transracial, then biracial then black. Of course that lead to the question of why didn’t she correct them? She went to her fallback answer - it’s more complex than a simple answer. So she has been in the interview close to four minutes at this time and said questions about her race are complex four times (I went back to count!). Are you ever going to break it down, or can you break it down?

So when Lauer poses the question to her that she didn’t correct them because it helped her, she kind of says no but as she gets deeper into the explanation it becomes a yes. Here’s a side thing she mentioned which makes me say she was helped out by people making assumptions she was black and not correcting them. Dolezal mentioned she was a black hair stylist and people thought she was mixed, bi racial or black. I’m going to assume, since this was the time frame they were talking about and she didn’t correct Lauer, she was in Idaho. OK, let’s be real. How many black people are in Idaho? If she was supplementing her income by being a black hair stylist, I’m sure she might have gotten work as a white woman, but it would have been tough. That’s my nice way of saying no black woman in Idaho, trying to support the small black population there, would get their hair done, especially in a black style by a white woman. They would go to a black woman, no doubt.

What you just said made me incredibly insulted. Just because your adopted brother that you now raise as your son calls you Mom doesn’t mean you’re black. Could this be the rationale you used to claim being black? Your parents adopted four black children, so by transference you can go around and say your black? I guess Mr. Drummond was black when adopted little Arnold and Willis. But wait, couldn’t it work the other way around? I’m mean, if your adopted brother calls you Mom, does that make him white? Alright, that may have gone a bit too far.

Maybe not. This is another spot where I had to rewind the footage. She said something so telling about her adopted brother now son that was interesting. He’s in high school right now and she said the following about that. “He said ‘You’re my real Mom’ and he’s in high school and for it to be something as plausible I certainly can’t be seen as white and be his Mom.” Let me give an opinion on what might be going on here. Her mother adopted four black boys in Montana. I bet going to PTA meetings, school functions, church functions and other outings there were probably looks. In college, she married a black man and probably there were looks, even though she was at Howard University. I think by the time she took custody of her adopted brother, maybe she felt the best way to not have him go through any pain or ridicule would be for her to become black. If we’re on the same timeline, she would still be in Idaho. It’s an unusual solution but if she was already identifying with the black experience, and in an effort to protect the high school age boy, she might convince herself it was a good idea. So far, the interview hasn’t talked about what caused the estrangement with her parents, but custody of her brother suggests the tension might have stemmed from how her parents were raising the brother.

Albert Wilkinson, the man in the picture whom she claims is her father, well Dolezal gave, in my opinion, a pretty convoluted answer. When Matt Lauer asked her about him, she claimed to have known Wilkinson for some time in Idaho, and while not saying it outright, she implied Wilkinson approached her. She doesn’t finish the thought but in my head she lets it hang out there that he was the one who called came up with the Dad idea, or at least, using the logic she used in an earlier part of the interview, didn’t correct others thinking he was her Dad. She even went to the old standard answer about the Dad question by saying any man can be a father but not every man can be a dad.

The question was asked about her lawsuit against Howard University, where her tuition and TA position was revoked. According to her, she was told that the money was to be used by people that needed it and since she was a white person she could have white relatives that could help her out. That was the end of that subject and I wish Lauer has pressed on. He did propose, before she answered, that some thought her lawsuit, suing as a white woman, showed she was fluid in her racial identity depending on the situation. Because there was no follow up it’s hard for me to tell just from the one answer, but if I had to go on the speculation branch, this answers the question of people who wonder what she could have gained by being a black woman. When she identified as white as an adult, she lost income. As a black woman, as far back as the Idaho days, with the black hair styling, the black Dad and her children, it was easier for her to navigate life as a black woman. She had a close knit support system and didn’t have to explain why a white woman had black kids.

Stop. Rachel Dolezal you need to stop thinking this discussion is some cosmic, societal or human experience that needs to be analyzed and debated. Stop thinking that your ‘struggle’ is some universal truth. It isn’t. It is always a good rule of thumb to realize it’s not the lie people have problems with, it’s the cover-up. If I give you the benefit of the doubt, and honestly I don’t want to, but if we assume you are a black woman trapped in a white woman’s body, you haven’t made a good case for it. My issue with what you have done is the construction of falsehoods, such as the black Dad who isn’t your dad. You want to be a martyr, a spokesperson for a cause but you have destroyed, in my eyes, any credibility becoming that because you decided to make a history of yourself that is false. You claim to know the experiences of black people but my dear you don’t. You know the stories, you know the incidents and I’m sure you can recite a lot of tragic circumstances from books and notes.

I can go to my parents and see the look in their eyes when they talk about segregation. I can hear in it in their voices. I can understand why they raised me with certain values and ideas because of the issues I will have to face the rest of my life. It’s not that I don’t think a white woman can understand the black experience, or any other ethic struggle, but it’s very colonial of you to assume because you married a black man, have a biracial child, taken in your black brother that was adopted by your parents and all the other things you identify with being black and assuming that makes you black. Maybe years, decades from now things might be different, but at this time in American society, you can’t just say you identify with being black when you aren’t. You even knew it because you set up the constructs to make yourself fit in. In the end, with a ten minute interview you haven’t come close to explaining the complexity of yourself.