Civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal misrepresented herself as black, claim parents
Spokane NAACP president’s biological parents say daughter is not African American, but German and Czech with traces of Native American
Friday 12 June 2015 12.08 BST Last modified on Friday 12 June 2015 14.34 BST
The biological parents of a prominent civil rights activist in Washington state have claimed that she has been misrepresenting herself as a black woman when her heritage is white.
Rachel Dolezal is an academic, chair of the Office of Police Ombudsman Commission in the Washington city of Spokane and president of the city’s chapter of African American civil rights organisation the NAACP.
Dolezal, professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University, where she specialises in Black Studies and African American culture, has regularly spoken out on local media about racial justice.
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The parents of prominent US civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal, who is accused of pretending to be African American, say their daughter is a master of disguise
But this week, in a recorded interview with the local Spokane news channel KREM 2 News, the Dolezals said their daughter’s biological heritage was not African American but German and Czech, with traces of Native American ancestry.
Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal said their daughter had black adopted siblings and had attended school in Mississippi where her social circle had been primarily African American. She had later married and subsequently divorced an African American man, they said.
Photograph displayed by the Dolezals of their daughter as a child
Photograph displayed by the Dolezals of their daughter as a child. Photograph: Family handout
Her parents claim that post-divorce in 2004, their daughter began to adapt her appearance. “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 biracial person. And that’s simply not true,” Mrs Dolezal said.
In the news video, the Dolezals displayed pictures of their daughter as a blonde child, and also at her wedding several years ago. The couple later provided a copy of their daughter’s birth certificate to the Spokesman-Review newspaper.
Dolezal has since told local media that she is not in touch with the Dolezals because of an ongoing lawsuit and does not view them as her real parents.
The 37-year-old told the Spokesman Review on Thursday 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 the subject was a “multilayered issue”.
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“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 Dolezal had listed her ethnicity as a mix of white, black and American Indian, as well as a number of others, in an application to the Office of Police Ombudsman Commission.
“We are gathering facts to determine if any city policies related to volunteer boards and commissions have been violated,” the 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, 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.
Rachel Dolezal walks out of an interview
“It is traditional to have a person of colour in that position, but that hasn’t always been the case in Spokane,” Wilburn 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 Dolezal’s numerous writings on civil rights issues, she does not discuss her own ethnicity in detail, but in several pieces she uses idioms such as “our cultural memory” when speaking about African American history.
In a lecture posted on YouTube, Dolezal speaks about the history of African American hairstyles, saying 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, but had been an active user of the site, posting commentary on African American issues and culture.
Rachel Dolezal gives a lecture about African American hairstyles
In a post about the Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave, Dolezal 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 have alleged she has portrayed her black adopted sibling, Izaiah, as her son in pictures on social media. Dolezal confirmed later to the CDA Press that Izaiah is one of her adopted brothers. “But I have full custody of him now,” she added.
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