Race controversy:
An artist and civil rights activist finds herself at the center of a furor over racial identity.
SPOKANE, Wash. — Rachel Dolezal leads the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, teaches African studies to college students and sits on a police oversight commission.
But the 37- year- old artist and activist with dark curly hair and light- brown skin now finds herself at the center of a furor over racial identity after family members said she has falsely portrayed herself as black for years when she is actually white. As proof, they produced pictures of her as a blonde, blue- eyed child.
The city is also investigating whether she lied about her ethnicity when she applied to be on the police board. And police said Friday they are suspending investigations into racial harassment complaints filed by Dolezal, including one from this year in which she said she received hate mail at her office.
The NAACP issued a statement Friday supporting Dolezal, who has been a longtime figure in Spokane’s human rights community.
“One’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership,” the group said.
Dolezal did not return several telephone messages left Friday. On Thursday, she avoided answering questions directly about her race and ethnicity in an interview with the Spokesman-Review newspaper.
“That question is not as easy as it seems,” she said. “There’s a lot of complexities ... and I don’t know that everyone would understand that.”
Dr. Camille Zubrinsky Charles, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in racial-identity issues, said people can identify with people of other races without doing what Dolezal did.
“For the most part, being a part of that community doesn’t require someone to claim that identity,” she said. “It might be difficult to become president of the local NAACP chapter, but achieving the goals? That in itself doesn’t require passing as a member of that group.”
Maybe she “saw her whiteness as a barrier to doing the advocacy work in the social justice world,” said Charles, who is black.
Ruthanne Dolezal of Troy, Mont., said this week that she has had no contact with her daughter in years. She said her daughter began to “disguise herself” after her parents adopted four black children more than a decade ago. Rachel Dolezal later married and divorced a black man and graduated from historically black Howard University.