U.S.

N.A.A.C.P. Leader Rachel Dolezal Posed as Black, Parents Say

By 
Rachel Dolezal, center, president of the NAACP in Spokane, Wash.,  before the start of a Black Lives Matter Teach-In in January. Tyler Tjomsland/The Spokesman-Review, via Associated Press
She has professed an affinity for black people since she was a teenager, when her parents adopted four black children. She chose a college where she could immerse herself in racial issues. She married a black man and built a reputation as an advocate for civil rights.
Rachel A. Dolezal is hardly the first person to embrace a racial identity she was not born or raised in, but a rare twist in her story has suddenly turned her into a subject of national debate. Ms. Dolezal, president of her localN.A.A.C.P. chapter and a university instructor in African-American studies, has claimed for years that her heritage is partly black. And that, her parents say, is a lie.
“She’s clearly our birth daughter, and we’re clearly Caucasian — that’s just a fact,” Lawrence A. Dolezal said in an interview from his home in Montana on Friday. “She is a very talented woman, doing work she believes in. Why can’t she do that as a Caucasian woman, which is what she is?”
Ms. Dolezal did not respond to numerous phone calls, emails or knocks on her door in Spokane, Wash., on Friday, but the allegation lit up the Internet, fueled by Ms. Dolezal’s apparent refusal to give a direct answer about her racial background, and by family photos of her as a blue-eyed teenager with straight, blond hair.
Rachel Dolezal in a childhood photo provided by her parents, Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal.
Ms. Dolezal, 37, quickly became a punch line on Twitter, the subject of countless barbed one-liners. But she also touched off a fierce Internet debate over the nature of race and racial categorization in America today, with commenters black and white, liberal and conservative, finding meaning in her story.
“The reason that her story is so fascinating to me and to the rest of the world is that it exposes in a disquieting way that our race is performance — that, despite the stark differences in how our races are perceived and privileged (or not) by others, they are all predicated on a myth that the differences are intrinsic and intrinsically perceptible,” wrote Steven W. Thrasher, a columnist for The Guardian.
Blacks and liberals accused Ms. Dolezal of an offensive impersonation, part of a long history in which whites appropriated black heritage when it suited them. Jonathan Capehart wrote in The Washington Post, “Blackface remains highly racist, no matter how down with the cause a white person is.” Others noted that for her, unlike black people, casting off the advantages of whiteness was a choice. “I wonder what race Rachel would become if she got stopped by the police?” the author Terry McMillan wrote on Twitter.
But many conservative commentators accused liberals of hypocrisy for accepting Caitlyn Jenner as a woman, but not Ms. Dolezal as black. “So, to recap, if Rachel Dolezal says she is a man, we must all agree, on pain of being publicly censured,” Rod Dreher wrote in The American Conservative. “But if Rachel Dolezal says she is black, it is fair game to challenge her claim.”
In National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke wrote that “lies are not necessarily delusions, and it is possible that Dolezal is just a good old-fashioned fabricator,” but he predicted that people on the left would eventually come to her defense.
American history is full of tales of partly black people “passing” as white, trying to shed the burdens of an oppressed people, but doing the reverse is much rarer. A recent study of census data by Yale researchers says that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as many as one-fifth of American black men posed as white at some point in their lives.
Faking a racial history, in either direction, raises difficult questions about what race is and why it matters, and about the assumptions people make.
Jim Crow laws often imposed a “one-drop rule” so that people with even a sliver of black ancestry, no matter how white they appeared, were legally considered black. It is only because of that history that Ms. Dolezal could be accepted as black, said Martha A. Sandweiss, a history professor of Princeton University.
“There was very little to be gained by identifying yourself as black, so if you did, no one questioned it,” said Ms. Sandweiss, author of “Passing Strange,” an acclaimed book about a man who did just that in the late 19th century. “It shows how absurd racial classifications often are.”
There have been other examples of white people living as black, in American history and culture, though not many. When in the company of his black wife and children, Clarence King, the subject of Ms. Sandweiss’s book, pretended to be a black Pullman porter, while in his parallel life he was a famous white geologist and surveyor with wealthy, powerful friends.
Mezz Mezzrow, a jazz musician who died in 1972, often passed as black, called himself “a voluntary Negro.” In his novel “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” set in the early 19th Century, Mark Twain skewered racial categories with the story of two infants who appear white and are switched — one a child of privilege, and the other a slave.Ms. Dolezal’s parents said that they each had a grandmother who was part Native American, but that otherwise, their ancestry is European. They said that for seven or eight years, friends and relatives brought to their attention that their daughter was telling reporters that she was part black. But they never discussed it with her, they said, and have not spoken with her since a falling-out two years ago.
Ms. Dolezal grew up in northwest Montana. When she was a teenager, her parents adopted four black children. After graduating from high school in 1995, she went to Belhaven College, now Belhaven University, a Christian school in Jackson, Miss., where she became involved in a “racial reconciliation ministry,” her father said.
After college, she earned a master’s degree in fine arts from Howard University, a historically black school in Washington, D. C. In 2000, she married Kevin Moore, with whom she had a son, now 13; they later divorced. Ms. Dolezal worked from 2008 to 2010 at the Human Rights Education Institute in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a short drive east of Spokane. Marilyn Muehlbach, a minister and board member of the institute, said Ms. Dolezal told people there that she was black.
People active in the Spokane chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. said she did the same there, but they requested anonymity because the chapter has not yet made any statement on the controversy. Ms. Dolezal was widely credited with breathing new life into the chapter, raising its visibility and membership in an overwhelmingly white region. A chapter official said the group’s executive committee would release a statement on Monday.
White people have held many positions within the N.A.A.C.P., and the national headquarters released a statement saying, “One’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for N.A.A.C.P. leadership,” but it did not address the issue of deception.
The mayor of Spokane, David A. Condon, appointed Ms. Dolezal to the Office of Police Ombudsman Commission, and on a form she filled out for that post, she checked the boxes for white, black and Native American. The mayor and the City Council president said they are looking into the matter, but a spokesman for Mr. Condon said he had no immediate plan to ask her to resign.
A spokesman for Eastern Washington University, where she has been a part-time instructor since 2010, would not say how she had represented herself there. Scott Finnie, the director of the Africana Education Program, who hired Ms. Dolezal, said that she was a popular and effective teacher, and that although he thought she was black, he did not feel offended by what he had heard this week.
In a Sky News interview posted online on Friday, Ms. Dolezal said, “I would definitely say, yes, I do consider myself to be black.”But in other interviews, she has seemed stumped by the question and said she needed to discuss it with her N.A.A.C.P. chapter. When a reporter for a local television station, KXLY, asked her Thursday if her father was African-American, she said, “I don’t know what you’re implying.”
“Are you African-American?” the reporter asked.
“I don’t understand the question,” she replied. When the reporter pressed, asking if her parents were white, she walked away.
Bill Morlin contributed reporting.