Last December, the biblically inspired Christian Bale film Exodus: Gods and Kings opened to boycotts for using white actors to play North African and Hebrew characters.
According to the Independent, one of the film’s most ardent critics was NAACP official Rachel Dolezal, who has not only been accused of the same trans-racial transgression, but might have taken method acting to a whole new level.
According to Dolezal, who has also claimed she was the target of multiple racially-motivated hate crimes, the film was guilty of “miseducation” and “misrepresentation”
Dolezal represented herself as a black woman for years as the president of the Spokane, WA chapter of the NAACP, despite being born to parents of German, Swedish, and Czech descent, and took issue with the casting of actors Bale, Aaron Paul, and Ben Kinglsey as North Africans.
“You have white, European actors playing North African historical figures, like they were in the ’30s and the ’40s,” Taylor Weech of Spokane’s KYRS said during an interview.
Dolezal responded: “A lot of people might go to the film. Hopefully nobody goes to that film… We need to boycott that film from my perspective.”
The now former NAACP official then described Exodus as “highly offensive,” and accused it of “robbing and shredding ancestry and history.
Dolezal stepped down as the NAACP head Monday, and sat down with Matt Lauer Tuesday, where she defended identifying herslef as black, and railed against those who made comparisons she was putting on blackface.
“I have a huge issue with blackface. This is not some freak ‘Birth of a Nation’ mockery blackface performance,” she told Today. “This is on a very real, connected level. How I’ve had to go there with the experience, not just a visible representation, but with the experience.”
She also told Lauer she never deceived anyone, and said, “it’s a little more complex than me identifying as black or answering a question of, are you black or white?”