Rachel Dolezal struggles after racial identity scandal

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — A civil-rights leader in Washington state who led others to believe she was black, then lost her job after her parents exposed her as white struggles to make a living these days.

Rachel Dolezal said she has been unable to find steady work in the nearly two years since her background became public in media reports, and she is uncertain about her future.

"I was presented as a con and a fraud and a liar," Dolezal told The Associated Press this week. "I think some of the treatment was pretty cruel."

Now 40, she still identifies as black, despite being "Caucasian biologically," she said. And she still has the darkened complexion and frizzy hair that allowed her for years to pass as a light-skinned black woman.

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

Dolezal had blond hair and freckles while growing up near Troy, Mont., with religious parents. She said she began to change her perspective as a teenager, after her parents adopted four black children. Dolezal decided to become publicly black years later, after a divorce.

The ruse worked for years until 2015, when her parents, with whom she has long feuded, told local reporters their daughter was born white but was presenting herself as a black activist in the Spokane region, an area with few minorities.

The story became an international sensation, and Dolezal lost the various jobs by which she pieced together a modest living.