Zena Kay Gresham

“God’s law required me to submit to male authority, and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t go to Heaven. Now that I was married I needed to yield to my husband’s will, even if that meant burying my own thoughts, feelings, and identity.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“As he was putting his books in his locker one day, a white male student pointed at Izaiah’s brand-new Air Jordans and said, “Those are some real nigger shoes.” What was most disturbing about this incident was that it wasn’t an aberration but a regular occurrence.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“And for Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old high school student, it was carrying candy while walking through a gated community in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012; he died after George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch coordinator, confronted Martin and shot him in the chest. When Trayvon Martin was shot—and even more so when George Zimmerman was later acquitted—mothers of Black boys nationwide went into a state of emergency, and I was no different.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“I stopped attending church for the first time in my life and began a process of redefining my faith in more spiritual terms. Up until that point, the power of religious guilt had me firmly in its grasp and the possibility of eternal punishment was omnipresent. I often found myself atoning for merely existing and hating my body and myself. Now, no longer!”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World