NBCBLK got a chance to sit down with self-identified trans-Black activist Rachel Dolezal this week, as she tours the media promoting her autobiography, In Full Color: Finding My Place In A Black And White World. Through their one-on-one, the former Spokane, WA NAACP chapter president gives a little insight into her unique perspective as a woman who was born white but sees herself as black.

Dolezal made headlines back in 2015, when after years of teaching Africana Studies at the university level, and organizing around cultural and social justice work, she was exposed by a local reporter who had followed a tip that led to the discovery that her parents are white. Some months back an exclusive done on Dolezal and what she's been up to since, revealed that the 39-year-old Montana native had been struggling to find work, and had ultimately been shunned by both black and white society, she said. At the time, Dolezal also disclosed that she had been shopping her book around and couldn't find a publisher. It was finally picked up by BenBella Books and released this month.

Dolezal expressed, to NBCBLK, a hope that through her unapologetic stance to walk the world as she knows herself to be, her story will help advance the nation's discourse on race. She noted a preference to be regarded as trans-black as opposed to transracial because the later would seem to suggest racial neutrality, and her social and political views on race are not neutral, said Dolezal. In response to question as to why she couldn't simply fight for the same social and political views, as a white ally, Dolezal told NBCBLK that she's tried fighting for the causes dear to her as a white woman, but there was always a certain harmony missing, with her having to detach from the black woman she knew herself to be.

Today, Dolezal walks the world as Nkechi Amare Diallo, a name she shared about having adapted after a trip to Africa. She says it was given to her by a local tribesman. "At the end of the book I discuss that an Igbo man reached out to me and really just said that, like 'We see you. My tribe sees you for who you are, and you have this high-frequency Nubian soul, and you were incarnated into this white envelope. And you were brought here as a gift from the gods to challenge white supremacy, spiritually," she writes.

Source: youtube.com