When Rachel Dolezal Attended Howard University, She Was Still White
LatestIt’s the day after Rachel Dolezal blew up Twitter and thoroughly confused people. Who was this white woman pretending to be black, we all wondered, so black she became the president of the Spokane, Washington NAACP? Where did she come from? Well, she came, in part, from the historically black Howard University.
Dolezal graduated from Howard with her Masters in Fine Art in 2002 alongside an administration source at the university who spoke to Jezebel on Friday under the condition of anonymity. When I called the school to confirm Dolezal had attended and graduated from the predominantly African American institution, the man who answered the phone had no idea about the social media firestorm Dolezal had ignited but he remembered her name.
“I know her and I remember her husband who went to medical school here,” he told Jezebel after he confirmed her graduation date over the phone. “All of her time has been controversial here, like when she presented her thesis.”
Dolezal’s final thesis was a series of paintings presented from the perspective of a black man and the late Dean Tritobia Benjamin, a formidable scholar whose specialty was black women in the arts, wanted to know how Dolezal felt qualified to tell this type of story as a white woman.