Rachel Dolezal, 37, has been the head of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, or NAACP, in Spokane, Washington, since January. Photo / Facebook via The Daily Telegraph
Rachel Dolezal, 37, has been the head of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, or NAACP, in Spokane, Washington, since January. Photo / Facebook via The Daily Telegraph
A prominent civil rights activist in the United States is facing investigation after her parents accused her of falsely passing herself off as black.
Rachel Dolezal, 37, has been the head of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, or NAACP, in Spokane, Washington, since January.
"She's our birth daughter and we're both of European descent," her father, Larry Dolezal, told Buzzfeed. "We're puzzled and it's very sad." Photo / Facebook
But her parents have now told US media that Ms Dolezal is in fact white - and has spent several years deliberately misleading the public and her colleagues about her race.
"She's our birth daughter and we're both of European descent," her father, Larry Dolezal, told Buzzfeed. "We're puzzled and it's very sad."
"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," her mother, Ruthanne Dolezal, told KREM news, a television network.
Earlier this week, Dolezal was asked about a photo posted online of a black man identified as Dolezal's father.
"I was wondering if your dad really is an African American man," Jeff Humphrey of KXLY4 asked Dolezal.
"I don't know what you're implying," Dolezal said.
Ms Dolezal is a prominent civil rights activists has made headlines several times since 2009 as the victim of hate crimes, including death threats and an alleged run-in with neo-Nazis in Idaho.
She also serves as the chair of a police oversight body called the office of police ombudsman commission and is a professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University, where her research interests include "the intersection of race, gender and class in the contemporary diaspora with a specific emphasis on black women in visual culture."
In her application for the police ombudsman commission she described herself as mixed-race white, black, and Native American, according to local media reports.
But her parents said Ms Dolezal is of German, Czech, and Swedish descent with a smattering of Native American ancestry.
Mr and Mrs Dolezal said their daughter had black siblings who were adopted and that she went to school in Mississippi, where the family were part of a mainly black community.
But they said she only began to claim African descent after divorcing her husband, who was also black, in 2004.
Her mother, Ruthanne, said Ms Dolezal began to "disguise herself" in 2006 or 2007.
Ms Dolezal later confirmed that Larry Dolezal was her father, and said she "understood" why people may feel she was guilty of misrepresentations but declined to elaborate.
"It's more important for me to clarify that with the black community and with my executive board than it really is to explain it to a community that, quite frankly, don't really understand the definitions of race and ethnicity," she said in a television interview.
The revelations about her deception emerged in the course of a police investigation into hate mail allegedly sent to Ms Dolezal at the NAACP branch in Spokane, Washington.
Spokane city council said they were carrying out an investigation to "determine if city policies had been violated."
