Rachel Dolazel: proud to be ‘black’ .
Two years after her controversial race unmasking Rachel Dolezal is still unapologetic and unashamed to identify as a black person
PEOPLE used to trust her and hang onto her every word. In her high-profile role as branch president of a respected American civil rights organisation Rachel Dolezal was admired for the no-holdsbarred way she spoke out about race issues and inequality.
Everyone just assumed that as a black woman she was speaking from experience. But they were wrong.
In 2015, Rachel’s parents came forward to reveal she was in fact white, not African-American as she’d led everyone to believe.
This revelation sparked outrage across the world, with people across the colour spectrum baying for her blood (YOU, 2 July 2015).
Called a liar, fraud, thief and race faker, she lost her job and credibility and gradually faded from people’s minds.
No one could bounce back from that, you’d think.
Except two years later, here she is sitting across from us in a Cape Town hotel, a lightly tanned woman with light brown braids – and she’s anything but apologetic.
Instead she insists she’s been unfairly judged. “There’s so much people don’t know,” Rachel (39) says.
Invited to South Africa as a guest speaker for the Quest for a Non-Racial South African Society Dialogue, her visit coincides with the publication of her biography, In Full Color: Finding My Place In A Black And White World, in which she explains the events that led to the unravelling of her life.
It all started when her parents, Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal, called her dishonest and deceitful in a CNN interview, she says. The result was that she was forced to resign the presidency of the Spokane branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Washington and she also lost a part-time job as professor of Africana studies at East Washington University.
At the time she chose to remain silent – but she’s had a change of heart.
“I didn’t feel I owed anyone my story. I didn’t feel the need to explain,” she says. “But now I do.”
AS A child she always felt out of place. Although she had blonde hair and freckles she was much darker than her brother, Josh – she says she believed this was why her ultra-conservative parents treated her as “the lesser child”.
Growing up, she wasn’t allowed to watch TV and was only allowed to read religious books. The only exception was National Geographic magazine which her grandmother subscribed to. It was here that Rachel, who was raised in the lily-white country town of Montana, first saw pictures of African people and fell in love with the continent.
Inspired by the pictures, she often imagined she was a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert as a way to escape her “oppressive” upbringing. Drawing was another escape.
“I loved drawing pictures of myself when I was young, and when it came time to shade in the skin, I usually picked the brown crayon rather than the peach one. The way I saw myself was instinctual, coming from some place deep inside.”
She’d always considered black to be beautiful so she was excited when her parents, who said they were heeding God’s call to save children from “the war on the unborn” (abortion), decided to adopt four African-American children.
After Ruthanne developed something similar to chronic fatigue syndrome, Rachel became like a second mom to her adopted siblings Ezra, Izaiah, Esther and Zach. She researched how to care for their hair, made cloth nappies out of flannel and rocked them to sleep.
“For the first time I felt unconditional love. I felt a sense of belonging because we bonded so closely.”
That sense of belonging deepened when she moved to an all-black neighbourhood in Mississippi where she taught art to a class of 25 kids.
Rachel says because she chose to live there and wore her hair in braids “people assumed I was black”.
This perception was amplified after she joined a civil rights union in her community.
But why didn’t she act to set the record straight?
“Race is a social construct,” Rachel says. “Culturally, politically and philosophically, I’ve always aligned with black culture.”
She insists she did nothing wrong by accepting the NAACP branch presidency. Although people assumed she was black she claims it wasn’t her intention to mislead them.
“I never meant to offend or exploit anyone,” she says. “Why can’t we be who we are? I was being true to myself. I was defining myself according to my belief structure but people perceived me in different ways.”
All hell broke loose when the truth came out.
“People wanted me dead,” Rachel recalls. “They took to Facebook saying my children should be removed from my care because I was crazy.”
AFTER the outcry she changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo “to protect my family” and she now identifies as “transracial”, which means she was born white but identifies as black. She compares her situation to that of transgender reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner.
She wasn’t surprised by the outcry her “outing” caused within the white community.
“They felt I had betrayed them by rejecting the golden ticket of being white,” she says.
But she’s still pained by the black community’s anger. “Whatever people believe of me I want them to know my advocacy work was always authentic.
“The idea that I was appropriating black culture when all I was doing was harmonising my internal with my external was fed by the narrative my parents started.”
She says she was already estranged from her parents when they made the startling revelation. Larry and Ruthanne don’t believe in divorce so they were disapproving when she split from her husband, Kevin Moore, an African-American with whom she has a son.
Things became even tenser between her and her parents after her brother, Izaiah, appealed to her to adopt him, claiming their parents abused him.
Larry and Ruthanne finally agreed to release the boy into Rachel’s care. On the adoption papers her race is listed as African-American.
But this was at Izaiah’s request, she insists.
“He didn’t want to explain to the kids at school where his parents were and why they were white. All he wanted to do was fit in.”
Rachel also denies she pretended to be black as a way to advance her career. She’d only been NAACP branch president for five months when her parents exposed her and she claims she hadn’t been paid to do the job.
It’s been hard to pick up the pieces after the fallout, she adds. Rachel, who has a master’s in fine art from Howard University in Washington, says she’s applied for 100 jobs without success.
She’s had to resort to braiding hair to earn cash but it isn’t enough so she now has to rely on government-issued food stamps to feed her two children. “I still feel stigmatised,” she says.
Rachel hopes her book will help people to see beyond the colour of her skin.
“I’m not a bad person,” she says. “But to stop being who I am is to cease to live.”