Rihanna has said that she believes that Rachel Dolezal is “a hero.”
“I think she was a bit of a hero, because she kind of flipped on society a little bit. Is it such a horrible thing that she pretended to be black? Black is a great thing, and I think she legit changed people’s perspective a bit and woke people up,” the singer said in the November issue of Vanity Fair.
Dolezal, the former head of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP, made international headlines last June when it was revealed she had been posing as an African American woman for years when in reality both of her parents are white.
Dolezal was also a professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University, specializing in black studies and African-American culture.
She told Matt Lauer on “Today” that she has identified as black ever since she was a child. “I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon, and black curly hair,” she said. “This is not some freak, ‘Birth of a Nation’ mockery performance.”
“I don’t think that anything that I have done with regards to the movement, my work, my life, my identity — I mean it’s all been very thoughtful and careful,” Dolezal said in an interview with MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry.