Rachel Dolezal 1 year later: ‘I don’t have any regrets about how I identify’

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Passing, United States, Videos on 2016-04-13 00:12Z by Steven

Rachel Dolezal 1 year later: ‘I don’t have any regrets about how I identify’

The Today Show
2016-04-12

Eun Kyung Kim

Rachel Dolezal said she remains puzzled about why people have questioned her racial identity but is “ready to move on” from the controversy that made her a household name last spring.

“I don’t have any regrets about how I identify. I’m still me and nothing about that has changed,” the former NAACP chapter president told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie on Tuesday.

Dolezal, who was born to white parents, created a national debate about racial identity after she told the world in a TODAY interview last June, “I identify as black.”…

Read the story and watch the interview here.

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The beauty of being mixed race: How I learned to love my hapa eyes

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States on 2015-08-13 00:09Z by Steven

The beauty of being mixed race: How I learned to love my hapa eyes

Today Show
2015-08-12

Samantha Okazaki, Multimedia Producer

“Chinese eyes, Chinese eyes,” the whole table mocked me with their stupid song, pulling at the corners of their eyelids until they were tiny slits; a gross exaggeration of my actual eye shape.

They weren’t being very nice … or creative. I’m not even Chinese.

But 8-year-old me didn’t know how to say that or how to put them in their place. How to tell them that I was born in Japan, but was just as much an American as they were. And that my eyes weren’t a caricature: they were real, they were mine and they were welling with tears.

Instead I wished I could bury myself in my cubby with my baseball cap and glitter pens and never come out. I blamed myself for giving them reason to taunt me. I hated my stupid eyes! I hated how small they were and how skinny. I hated the tic I had developed, a hard deliberate blink that got worse when I was nervous or self-conscious. I hated my dad for giving me my eyes. And I hated being half-Japanese because it meant I looked different than everyone else.

Fast-forward 10 years later. Aside from the tic, which followed me wherever I went, I had pretty much buried all memories of the bullying my eyes had inspired. Then, I moved to the East Coast for college.

I moved away from my hometown that was surprisingly diverse and my friend group that was predominantly mixed race. I unpacked my bags in upstate New York and was greeted with a level of racism I had thought to be extinct…

Read the entire article here.

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