“I’ve lost my jobs n friends since race was revealed” - Rachel Dolezal

In an interview with Vanity Fair Rachel Dolezal reveals she is now making a living braiding hair and says that if anyone was misled it was their fault for putting the wrong construction on her identity.

The white woman who for years convinced America she was black says she has lost her job and her friends after her true ethnicity was revealed.

But although Rachel Dolezal says she no longer identifies as African-American, she still maintains she is "black" and has a connection with and awareness of the black experience.

Ms Dolezal's true identity was revealed in June when her parents revealed they were Caucasian and so was their daughter, who was a leading light in the US black civil rights movement.

The 37-year-old subsequently cut short a filmed interview with a news reporter when she was confronted with evidence that she was not African-American.

She subsequently stepped down as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter in Spokane, Washington.

"I wouldn't say I'm African-American, but I would say I’m black, and there’s a difference in those terms," she told the magazine.

"I didn't deceive anybody. If people feel misled or deceived, then sorry that they feel that way, but I believe that's more due to their definition and construct of race in their own minds than it is to my integrity or honesty."

Ms Dolezal claims she recently received a traffic ticket from a police officer who identified her as black on the ticket without asking for her ethnicity. 

But she defends her choice to identify as black by insisting the theme of "blackness" is an imprecise definition when applied to the African-American experience and to cultural identity.

"It's hard to collapse it all into just a single statement about what is," she says. "You can't just say in one sentence what is blackness or what is black culture or what makes you who you are.

Ms Dolezal told the magazine she has lost her part-time teaching job on an Africana studies program and her other job at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"I’ve got to figure it out before August 1, because my last paycheck was like $1,800 in June," she said. "[I lost] friends and the jobs and the work and, oh, my God, so much at the same time."

"I don't know spiritually and metaphysically how this goes, but I do know that from my earliest memories I have awareness and connection with the black experience, and that's never left me.

"It’s not something that I can put on and take off anymore. I've had my years of confusion and wondering who I really [was] and why and how do I live my life and make sense of it all.

"But I’m not confused about that any longer. I think the world might be, but I'm not."