All this posturing appeared to do the trick, helping to establish Miss Dolezal as a leading light of the black rights movement in America\u2019s Pacific Northwest. She is the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Spokane, Washington state\u2019s second- biggest city. She also runs the city\u2019s police oversight committee and is an African Studies professor at the local university, where she gives impassioned classes on The Black Woman\u2019s Struggle.<\/p>\n
Now, however, after her horribly misrepresented parents decided it was time to reveal the truth about their daughter, her astonishing, decade-long deception has come spectacularly tumbling down. When a TV news crew finally confronted her, and asked if she was African-American, she eventually stammered that she \u2018didn\u2019t understand the question\u2019 and ran off to hide in a dress shop.<\/p>\n
Officials are now investigating whether she should be prosecuted for lying about her racial background in her application for the police ombudsman\u2019s job. She might yet also face trouble from police, who have dropped investigations into all nine of the alleged race hate crimes she suffered amid allegations she invented them.<\/p>\n
This outlandish case could have been dismissed as an example of someone merely seeking to get a leg up in their career by posing as someone they are not. But this is America, with its bitter legacy of slavery and segregation.<\/p>\n
Black or mixed-race Americans have for centuries been passing themselves off as white in order to better their lives, but you can probably count on one hand the number of people who have tried to go in the opposite direction. So what are we to think of a talented young white woman who has spent the past decade pretending to be black?<\/p>\n
Miss Dolezal is bound to fuel the growing furore when she addresses the media tonight at a meeting of her NAACP group. Deeply embarrassed to have been hoodwinked so easily, the national organisation has nevertheless supported her, praising her record and insisting that one\u2019s racial identity is irrelevant in leading the group.<\/p>\n
However, most people don\u2019t believe for a second that she would have risen so far in the civil rights industry if she had been recognised as a white middle-class woman from a conservative family.<\/p>\n
Unlike in many areas of life in America, being black is an obvious advantage in the civil rights industry where \u2014 to quote one commentator \u2014 it is seen as more \u2018authentic\u2019.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s peculiar about Rachel Dolezal, however, is that she is still insisting, even after her public exposure, that she really is black.<\/p>\n
Whether this is a case of serious delusion or a brazen attempt to bluff it out is hard to tell. Although her parents, Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal, say they each have a grandparent who had some Native American blood, neither has any black lineage.<\/p>\n
Miss Dolezal claims her parents timed their revelations to discredit her in an upcoming trial concerning sex abuse allegations relating to her brother, Joshua, 39, in which he will appear as a witness. They say they only spoke out after being approached by the media.<\/p>\n
Their family background is a mix of German, Czech and Swedish. Nevertheless, Rachel was \u2018always interested in ethnicity and diversity\u2019 growing up, says her mother. That accelerated when her parents adopted four black infants in the Nineties.<\/p>\n
Ironically, it appears that racism from black people may have spurred her to want to become one of them.
Her brother Ezra says Miss Dolezal \u2014 still with a pale complexion and straight blonde hair \u2014 complained to her family of suffering racism.<\/p>\n
She developed a \u2018dislike for being white, and for white people\u2019 that boiled down to \u2018self-hatred\u2019, he believes.<\/p>\n
After university, she had a short-lived marriage to an African-American man which produced a son but ended, she claims, because her husband became violent to her and to the child.<\/p>\n
In around 2006 or 2007, she started to \u2018disguise\u2019 herself as black, says her mother. It started with her hair \u2014 she had enjoyed arranging the hair of her adopted black sister, Esther \u2014 and Miss Dolezal was soon braiding her own in the same ethnic style, often covering it in an African headwrap.<\/p>\n
By 2011, say family members, she was applying make-up to her face to appear \u2018darker and darker\u2019. A new look needed a new back story, and hers was elaborate \u2014 born in a tepee and brought up in South Africa, she said she had had to hunt with a bow and arrows for food.<\/p>\n
None of it, say her family, is remotely true \u2014 she hasn\u2019t even set foot in Africa.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to scoff now at the many times this firebrand has eloquently spoken out about the difficulties of living as a black woman in a largely white part of the States. Even going to the cinema to watch 12 Years A Slave was an ordeal, she said, as she felt the eyes of her white neighbours turn to watch her reaction.<\/p>\n
In 2010, she told the New York Times that she could \u2018not imagine showing her face\u2019 at an event held by the Tea Party, the ultra-conservative faction in the Republican Party, because of the preponderance of white faces. \u2018It would make me nervous to be there unless I went with a big group,\u2019 she said. Only last December, she wrote a column about the \u2018asphyxiation we are experiencing as black people in America\u2019.
A video clip, entitled Black Is Beautiful, shot in one of the classes she gives at Eastern Washington University, shows her railing against how black women\u2019s hairstyles have been dictated by \u2018white supremacy and racism\u2019.<\/p>\n
Talking about one particular style of African-American hair, she tugs at her own tight curls and says: \u2018Like this.\u2019<\/p>\n
Thanks to her pretence, Miss Dolezal got away with a lot of arguably racist behaviour of her own. She once refused to allow a light-skinned Hispanic student to participate in a class exercise about white oppression because \u2018she didn\u2019t look Hispanic\u2019.<\/p>\n
Her tweets included one in which she lambasted the Oscar-winning film The Help, which examines the nature of social segregation between black and white, sniffing how it had \u2018put $206mil in a white woman\u2019s pocket\u2019.<\/p>\n
In another tweet, she praised a video entitled \u2018S**t White Girls Say … to Black Girls\u2019, claiming it was \u2018true2life\u2019.<\/p>\n
It would be easy simply to goggle in astonishment \u2014 and many have. Critics of overweening political correctness are having a field day over the lengths one liberal white woman has gone to identify with black oppression. Dolezal may even remind British TV viewers of the ludicrous Ali G, the white rapper persona created by the comic Sacha Baron Cohen, who liked to complain at every perceived slight: \u2018Is it because I is black?\u2019<\/p>\n
Conservatives have also highlighted what they see as the hypocrisy of liberals who have condemned Miss Dolezal\u2019s claims to be black, yet applauded the recent announcement by former Olympic decathlon champion Bruce Jenner that he is now a woman calling herself Caitlyn.<\/p>\n
Why can Jenner \u2014 who hasn\u2019t even had gender-altering surgery \u2014 say he\u2019s a woman if she can\u2019t say she\u2019s black?<\/p>\n
But those on the Left, and many black commentators, say the comparison is unfair. Not only is \u2018blacking up\u2019 deeply racially offensive, they say, but there is the whole history of America\u2019s unhappy race relations to take into account.<\/p>\n
For years, under the so-called Jim Crow laws which preserved racial segregation in the South \u2014 even deep into the 20th century \u2014 a \u2018one drop of blood\u2019 rule meant that people with even the smallest trace of black ancestry were legally considered black.<\/p>\n
For many, this was catastrophic. But according to academics, this has also established a tradition whereby pretty much any American can say they are black and not be challenged.<\/p>\n
Indeed, those who have leapt to Rachel Dolezal\u2019s defence say that if she wants to say she is black, why should anyone deny her that? The problem is that one click of the mouse in the internet age provides pictures of her as a young freckle-faced blonde girl, making a mockery of it all.<\/p>\n
\u2018I wonder what race Rachel would become if she got stopped by the police?\u2019 the \u2014 genuinely \u2014 black woman author Terry McMillan mused waspishly on Twitter. Unfortunately, one suspects, Miss Dolezal would seize on any mistreatment by the police as further proof of her noble struggle as an oppressed black woman. – DailyMail.co.uk (shortened)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Everyone sometimes feels the urge to reinvent themselves \u2014 to start again afresh in a new place, free from the assumptions others have made about them. Even so, after Rachel Dolezal moved from their family home in Montana to the city of Spokane in Washington State, her adopted brother was stunned to learn just how … Continue reading “Biological white but ‘ethnic black’ Rachel Dolezal lied about growing up in South Africa”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":19393,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[250,11915,11917,11916,526],"class_list":["post-19392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","tag-black","tag-racherl-dolezal","tag-spokane","tag-transethnic","tag-white"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/rachel_dolezal_white.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19392"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19395,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19392\/revisions\/19395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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