Rachel Dolezal

“If somebody has hope, don't take that away from them, because maybe that's all they have.”

“I think that it is too common for white feminists to say, 'We want some diversity. Come join our movement about gender, but we want you to check the class and race at the door.' And you can't undo that braid of race, class, and gender: all three intersect with each other, so it's important for more education to be done about that.”

“Overall, my life has been one of survival, and the decisions that I have made along the way, including my identification, have been to survive.”

“I want to provide for my kids.”

“Any man can be a father; not any man can be a dad.”

“It's a painful thing to talk about my childhood. I kind of don't talk about it much.”

“Blackness better defines who I am philosophically and socially than whiteness does.”

“I did work and bought all my own clothes and shoes since I was 9 years old. That's not a typical American childhood life.”

“I was not born in a teepee - that I know of. I actually don't know where I was born.”

“My husband didn't want me to wear any black hairstyles. Nicole Kidman was his standard of beauty.”

“I would pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo... imagining I was a different person living in a different place was one of the few ways... that I could escape the oppressive environment I was raised in.”

“People didn't seem able to consider that maybe both were true. OK, I was born to white parents, but maybe I had an authentic black identity.”

“From a very young age, I felt a spiritual, visceral, instinctual connection with 'black is beautiful.' Just the black experience and wanting to celebrate that. And I didn't know how to articulate that as a young child.”

“Everybody's life matters. But that's why we have to say black lives matter, because the highest disproportionality, police brutality, disenfranchisement, education disproportionality in school discipline, curriculum, misrepresentation, all of this.”

“I wish Americans understood that race is a social construct, even if we don't want it to be.”

“Have I had experiences by other people identifying me as black and behaving towards me as black? Yes. Just for as long as maybe somebody who was born categorised as black? No.”

“I don't believe in reverse racism. I really don't.”

“I think there's definitely a stereotype of white privilege, and that stereotype gets expanded to mean rich, not oppressed, not suffering, et cetera. And yes, it's a misperception.”

“Nothing about being white describes who I am.”

“I don't think you can do something wrong with your identity if you're living in your authenticity.”