An NAACP leader and prominent civil rights activist in Washington state
has been pretending to be black for years, her parents admitted local
media Thursday.
Rachel Dolezal, who heads Spokane’s NAACP chapter and teaches Africana
studies at Eastern Washington University, refused to directly answers
any questions about her alleged racial ruse after it was exposed.
A KXLY reporter bluntly asked her, “Are you African American?”
After a stunned pause, she replied: "“I don’t understand the question."
The question of her race "is not as easy as it seems," Dolezal told the Spokane Spokesman-Review.
"We're all from the African continent," she added.
Dolezal’s parents, who are both white, provided a birth certificate and childhood pictures of their daughter to the Coeur d’Alene Press to back up their claims she has been grossly misrepresenting herself.
The birth certificate confirmed she was born to the white couple, and
the pictures show Dolezal as a pasty, blonde child — a complete contrast
the darker skin and curly brown hair she has now.
“It is very disturbing that she has become so dishonest,” Dolezal’s mother, Ruthanne Dolezal, told the Idaho newspaper.
Her parents also alleged a much wider web of warped lies Dolezal spun
about her background. A black man who Dolezal has publicly claimed to be
her son is in fact her adopted brother, they said — a fact Dolezal
confirmed to the paper.
Dolezal also lied about growing up in a teepee, hunting for her own
food with bows and arrows, being abused by a stepfather and once living
in South Africa, her parents said.
Some of her family members did live in South Africa for four years, but
“Rachel did not even ever visit us there,” her mom said.
Dolezal initially maintained that she is African-American, telling the
Coeur d'Alene Press: "They can DNA test me if they want to."
Her parents, who live in Troy, Montana, told the Seattle Times Thursday they are estranged from their daughter and have no idea why she lied.
Dolezal, 37, was elected as the president of the NAACP Spokane chapter
last November and took the post at the beginning of this year, according
to her Facebook page.
She also chairs the city’s newly created police oversight commission.
The city is now investigating if she violated its code of ethics in her
application for that position.
She did not return a Daily News request for comment.
Dolezal initially came under scrutiny this week when Spokane Police
raised suspicions about threatening hate mail she said she received
earlier in the year. She said found an evelope in the chapter's post
office box containing 20 pages of notes, including pictures of lynchings
and the term "war pig."
But a police investigation revealed the envelope had never been
canceled or timestamped, and was put in a box only accessible to USPS
employees or someone with a key, the Spokesman Review reported.
Dolezal is an adjunct professor at Eastern Washington University’s Africana Education program. Her bio
on the school’s site says she is a widely popular speaker and visual
artist whose “efforts were met with opposition by North Idaho white
supremacy groups, the Ku Klux Klan, the Neo Nazis and the Aryan Nations,
and at least eight documented hate crimes targeted Doležal and her
children during her residency in North Idaho.”
Dolezal's Facebook page is filled with posts about civil rights
marches, alleged instances of racism against her and supposed details
about her childhood.
In one November 2013 post, she offered tips for black viewers to watch
the period drama "12 Years a Slave," which she called "not the best film
to take a white partner on a first date to."
She advised: "sit in the top, back row so that during the movie people
aren't constantly looking at you to monitor the 'Black response' to the
film."
The same day, she wrote another post about a slave character in the film, Patsey, played by Lupita Nyong'o.
"When Patsy [sic] makes the dolls with the braided arms in '12 Years,'
it brought back memories of when I was a little girl and made the same
husk dolls in the garden, only I braided their hair instead of the
arms...," Dolezal wrote.
The Spokane chapter has not commented on the controversy. A Tuesday post on its Facebook page
said Dolezal was interviewed by Al Jazeera about "police accountability
in Spokane," with the clip to be broadcast "in several days."
Another post on the page, from January, shows Dolezal standing with a black man who is identified as her "father."
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