Just when you thought Rachel Dolezal‘s story couldn’t get any more bizarre, boom…it definitely just did.
According to her upcoming memoir, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World, Dolezal not only recounts the moments where she craved being black, but she also details a few occurrences from her childhood that will also have you surprised (if you can be surprised by Dolezal anymore).
In the book, which is to be released next week, the former president of the NAACP’s Spokane chapter explains what it was like to grow up in a poor household in the Montana mountains. Her parents were strict Evangelicals, and she compared some of her life experiences as a pale, blonde white girl to slavery.
She writes that she was born into this “painfully white world” in a teepee in 1977, and she deals with issues linked to being molested by her brother at the age of 12. She also has PTSD from her parents beating her as a child, and she claims that her parents made her eat her own vomit after her inability to finish a bowl of oatmeal.
Dolezal first became interested in blackness after reading her grandmother’s issues of National Geographic.
“I’d stir the water from the hose into the earth … and make thin, soupy mud, which I would then rub on my hands, arms, feet, and legs,” she writes. She also wrote about her fascination with having darker skin as a child, where she said she would draw herself as a brown or black girl.
“I usually picked a brown crayon rather than a peach one. Peach simply didn’t resonate with me,” she wrote. Her real sense of family came from her mother’s adoption of four black children when Rachel was a girl.
“I found myself drawing closer to something that felt oddly familiar,” she wrote. “For the first time in my life, I felt like I was truly part of a family.”
Despite her various controversies, Dolezal maintains that she is just an “unapologetically black” woman.
“For me, Blackness is more than a set of racialized physical features,” she writes in the book’s epilogue. “It involves acknowledging our common human ancestry with roots in Africa.”
Read more excerpts from Dolezal’s memoir in the New York Post.
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