Woman Birth By White Parents Claims She’s Black

The parents of a white NAACP leader who claimed to be African American have claimed that she cut them out because she didn’t want them ruining her image.

Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal spoke from their home in Troy, Montana on Friday after they revealed that their daughter, Spokane’s NAACP Chapter President, Rachel Dolezal, has been misleading people about her ethnicity for years.

Dolezal, who has been a civil rights activist across Idaho and Washington and works part-time as an Africana Studies professor at Eastern Washington University, is now facing a city ethics probe for falsely claiming on an application that she was black.

Her parents, who have not spoken to her in years, say they first found out she was claiming to be African American as they read a newspaper article about her ‘some years ago,’ adding that she never claimed to be biracial or African-American in their presence.

Her parents said claimed in interviews that they were violent towards her, which they have denied. Instead, they say she has cut them out because she fears they will blow her cover.

‘Rachel has chosen to distance herself from the family and be hostile towards us. She doesn’t want us to be where she is, she doesn’t want to be seen with us because it ruins her image,’ her mum said.

The couple has adopted four younger children of color – three African-American children and another from Haiti – but they say their daughter’s interest in diversity far preceded that.

They always surrounded themselves with friends of different ethnicities, they said, and when she graduated from Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi, she applied to Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C.

Although she did not claim to be African American in her application, the family believes the school thought Dolezal was black, because she was coming from Jackson and her artwork used African imagery.   

‘The way we understood, eyes were popping and jaws were dropping when she walked in to finalize her registration,’ her father told CNN.

Her mother added: ‘For that application, I do not believe Rachel was deceptive as she has been more recently.’

As time went on, their daughter began sounding African American on the phone and then she started to ‘disguise herself’ from around 2007, her parents said.

Although they and other friends in their community knew that she was white, they did not speak out about it because they originally thought it was an ‘artistic representation’.

But after learning that she was claiming to be African American, they did not take the initiative to say anything until they were recently contacted, they said.

‘We’ve never been asked these questions until now,’ her father said.

They told the truth and confirmed that they were her biological parents when they were recently contacted, they said.

The couple has also shared images of Dolezal as a child; while today the 37-year-old divorcee sports tight, dark curls, the photos show a fair and freckled blonde child.

One of her adopted brothers, 21-year-old Zach, backed up his parents’ story by telling the Washington Post that when he visited his sister in Spokane, he was told not to speak of Larry and Ruthanne as their parents.

She has also previously claimed that her white father is her step-father.

In January, a photo showing Dolezal and a black man on the Spokane NAACP’s Facebook erroneously identified the man as her father.

On Wednesday, a reporter from KXLY confronted Dolezal a photo of her with the African-American man while on camera.

‘Ma’am, I was wondering if your dad really is an African-American man,’ the KXLY reporter asked.

‘I don’t understand the question,’ Dolezal replied. ‘I did tell you [that man in the picture] is my dad.’

‘Are your parents white?’ the reporter asked. Dolezal then removed her mic and walked away.

Reached by the Spokesman-Review, Dolezal answered questions about her ethnicity by saying: ‘That 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.’

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Source: DailyMail