UPDATE: On “All In with Chris Hayes” on Tuesday, Harris-Perry conceded that it is a possibility that Dolezal could be a con artist.
MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry declared that she didn’t get a “sense of” “malice, deception, or self-gain” on Rachel Dolezal’s part on Tuesday’s “NOW with Alex Wagner.”
Harris-Perry, while discussing her interview with Dolezal said, “I also met friends and family of hers and that there is not, at least in the interactions that I had, any sense of, at least that I could experience, of malice, deception, or self-gain here, that this is maybe confusing and hard and difficult to talk about, but not malicious.”
Later, she stated, “I guess I remain distressed by the idea that there is some core racial truth of who we are and that the rest of it is deception. When in fact we know it is socially constructed, and therefore awfully messy.”
Harris-Perry did add that “if it is a lie, the thing that makes it newsworthy is that it is fascinating and interesting, not because it’s particularly egregious in the sense of the kinds of harm–.”
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