The parents of a civil rights activist in America says she's been "pretending to be black" for years.
Rachel
Dolezal works for an organisation called the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Spokane, around 280 miles
away from Seattle in the north-west corner of the US.
According to the Spokesman-Review newspaper,
Dolezal said she was a mix of white, black and American Indian on her
application to serve on the city's citizen police ombudsman commission
in January.
That application is now being investigated.
Spokane Mayor David Condon and City Council President Ben Stuckart issued a statement.
"We are committed to independent citizen
oversight and take very seriously the concerns raised regarding the
chair of the independent citizen police ombudsman commission. We are
gathering facts to determine if any city policies related to volunteer
boards and commissions have been violated," it read.
Ms Dolezal's mother and father, a white couple called Ruthanne and Lawrence Dolezal, say that she is their biological daughter.
Dolezal's parents, who live in Troy, MT, say Rachel has been deceiving people. They want people to know the truth.
The parents of a civil rights activist in America says she's been "pretending to be black" for years.
Rachel
Dolezal works for an organisation called the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Spokane, around 280 miles
away from Seattle in the north-west corner of the US.
According to the Spokesman-Review newspaper,
Dolezal said she was a mix of white, black and American Indian on her
application to serve on the city's citizen police ombudsman commission
in January.
That application is now being investigated.
Spokane Mayor David Condon and City Council President Ben Stuckart issued a statement.
"We are committed to independent citizen
oversight and take very seriously the concerns raised regarding the
chair of the independent citizen police ombudsman commission. We are
gathering facts to determine if any city policies related to volunteer
boards and commissions have been violated," it read.
Ms Dolezal's mother and father, a white couple called Ruthanne and Lawrence Dolezal, say that she is their biological daughter.
The row surfaced after a picture was published earlier this
year on the NAACP's Spokane Facebook page showing Dolezal and an
African-American man, who's identified as her dad.
Local news reporter Jeff Humphrey from ABC affiliate KXLY4
asked Dolezal about the claims during an interview about hate mail she
claimed she has received through the NAACP's post office box at Spokane
in Washington State.
"Ma'am, I was wondering if your dad really is an African-American man," he asked.
"I don't understand the question," answered Dolezal. "I did tell you [that man in the picture] is my dad."
"Are your parents white?" Humphrey asked.
After
that question Dolezal took off her microphone and walked away into a
nearby clothing shop leaving her car keys and purse behind.
She says she's been targeted more than a dozen times in both Spokane and Coeur D'Alene but police haven't made any arrests.
The
37-year-old, who's a part-time professor in the Africana Studies
programme at Eastern Washington University, also claims to have two
black sons in the same interview.
But Dolezal's parents say one of those boys is her adopted brother Izaiah, one of four black children they raised.
Rachel Dolezal is an academic, chair of the office of the police
ombudsman commission in the city of Spokane and president of its chapter
of the African American civil rights organisation NAACP.
Dolezal, a professor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington
University, where she specialises in black studies and African American
culture, has spoken out regularly on local media about racial justice.
This week, however, in an interview with the local Spokane news channel KREM 2 News,
Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal said their daughter’s biological heritage
was not African American but German and Czech, with traces of Native
American ancestry.
They said their daughter had adopted black siblings and had attended
school in Mississippi, where her social circle had primarily been
African American. She later married and subsequently divorced an African
American man, they said.
A photograph Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal displayed of their daughter as a child. Photograph: Family handout
They claim that she began to adapt her appearance following her
divorce in 2004. “Rachel has wanted to be somebody she’s not. She’s
chosen not to just be herself, but to represent herself as an African
American woman or a bi-racial person and that’s simply not true,”
Ruthanne Dolezal said.
In the video, the Dolezals showed pictures of their daughter as a
blonde child, and at her wedding several years ago. The couple later
provided a copy of their daughter’s birth certificate to the Spokesman-Review newspaper.
Rachel Dolezal has since told local media she is not in touch with
the couple because of an ongoing lawsuit, and that she does not view
them as her real parents.
The 37-year-old told the Spokesman-Review on Thursday that she would
prioritise speaking to her executive committee before commenting on
speculation in the media. “I feel like I owe my executive committee a
conversation,” she said, adding that the subject was a “multilayered
issue”.
“The question is not as easy as it seems. There’s a lot of
complexities … and I don’t know that everyone would understand that.
We’re all from the African continent.”
A statement from Spokane city hall said she had listed her ethnicity
as a mix of white, black, Native American and a number of others in her
application to the office of the police ombudsman commission.
“We are gathering facts to determine if any city policies related to
volunteer boards and commissions have been violated,” Spokane’s mayor,
David Condon, and the council president, Ben Stuckart, said in a joint
statement. “That information will be reviewed by the city council, which
has oversight of city boards and commissions.”
James Wilburn, a former president of the Spokane NAACP chapter, told the Coeur d’Alene Press that Dolezal’s race was not what had qualified her for the position in the organisation.
“It is traditional to have a person of colour in that position, but
that hasn’t always been the case in Spokane,” he said. A woman of
European descent was president in the 1990s, he added, and half of the
chapter members were not black. “That is probably a result of the fact
that only 1.9% of the population in Spokane is African American,” he
said.
In a statement on Friday, the NAACP said its local coalition “stands behind” Dolezal’s record.
“One’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership,” the national group said.
Dolezal does not discuss her own ethnicity in detail in her numerous
writings on civil rights issues, but in several pieces she uses idioms
such as “our cultural memory” when speaking about African American
history.
In a lecture posted on YouTube, she speaks about the history of
African American hairstyles and says she will describe “what happened to
our hair here in America” when slavery meant certain kinds of styles
were banned.
Since the current furore began, Dolezal has closed down her Facebook
page, having been an active user of the site to post commentary on
African American issues and culture.
In a post about the Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave, she said it was “not the best film to take a white partner to on a first date”.
She advocates sitting in the back row of the cinema so that “if white
people are inclined to stare, they have to turn all the way round to do
it … so that during the movie people aren’t constantly looking at you
to monitor the ‘black response’ to the film”.
Dolezal’s parents also allege she has portrayed her adopted black
sibling Izaiah as her son in pictures on social media. Dolezal confirmed
later to the CDA Press that Izaiah is an adopted brother. “But I have
full custody of him now,” she added.
Spokane NAACP’s Facebook page has an image of Dolezal with an older black man, whom it describes as her father. The CDA Press,
however, names the man as Albert Wilkerson, a volunteer at the Human
Rights Education Institute in north Idaho, where Dolezal previously
worked.
In an interview about her portrait art with the Easterner
magazine, Dolezal described a traumatic upbringing during which her
parents would “punish us by skin complexion”. She also described being
raised in a teepee and hunting for food with a bow and arrow. Her
parents have confirmed that they lived in a teepee, but before their
daughter was born.
Dolezal has been a regular face at local demonstrations and on TV
channels, and has made the news on numerous occasions for the graphic
hate mail she has received, including nooses left at her home.
In one of the most recent incidents,
she found an envelope containing pictures of lynchings in Spokane
NAACP’s postbox at the local sorting office. Postal workers later told
police the envelope had never been posted, and had been placed in the
box by someone who had an access key.
The parents of a civil rights activist in America says she's been "pretending to be black" for years.
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