Dolezal 2012 Video: Get ‘Older White Men’ off Currency

Three years before the Obama Administration cynically decided to remove Alexander Hamilton from the $10 bill and replace him with a woman, the Washington Post reported that Rachel Dolezal posted a video in which she ranted about the “older white men” on American currency and coinage.

Dolezal, a professor at Eastern Washington University who occasionally taught art history, sipped a glass of what looked like white wine in front of what looked like her work while she pontificated, ripping the men whose faces are on American currency:

… watch this little short video I’m gonna make, not just about art this time, but about something that we carry in the palms of our hands on a daily basis, hopefully, that reminds us every single day of our lives who is in charge. That would be something green; we might call it Benjamins, in the case of the hundred-dollar bill, or the twenty-dollar bill with Jackson, or the fifty-dollar bill with Ulysses S. Grant, the one-dollar bill with George Washington, and of course we know that’s all the printmaking money, and then we have bas-relief coins, art that represents value and depicts similar imagery, some of the same characters, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and so forth on our coins.

Then she said:

So what does this mean, this constant daily reminder of who’s in charge? What psychological or sociological effect does that have on us and our children when we want money? We want to be successful, we want to be financially abundant and have what we not just need but the things that we desire in life?

Dolezal continued:

So a lot of our lives are driven by earning this stuff right here and this is connected to art history and has imagery on it that has, if we have forgotten, a very political propaganda element in terms of reminding us that older white men were in charge and still, to this day, in a majority sense, are.

Dolezal then put in a plug for President Barack Obama, who had only been in office three years:

Of course, we don’t have any coinage or currency of our current president, if we did, that would perhaps diversify things a little bit with regards to our political reminders on a daily basis. But that being the case we do not have any gender diversity, age diversity or ethnicity diversity. This is what we have. We have older white men on our currency. So what does that do to us as an image, part of our history, how does that affect us psychologically?

Living persons cannot legally be placed on American currency.