Ruthanne Dolezal said that her daughter began to “disguise herself” in the mid-2000s, after the family had adopted four African-American children.
Controversy erupted around a local NAACP leader in Washington state Thursday after family members told a local newspaper that she had misrepresented herself as black.
Rachel Dolezal is the head of the NAACP’s chapter in Spokane and is also a part-time professor in the Africana Studies Program at Eastern Washington University. The Spokane Spokesman-Review says that Dolezal described her ethnicity as white, black, and American Indian in an application to be the volunteer chairwoman of the city’s Police Ombudsman Commission, a position to which she was duly appointed.
But Dolezal’s mother, Ruthanne, told the paper that the family’s actual ancestry is Czech, Swedish, and German, along with some “faint traces” of Native American heritage.
“It’s very sad that Rachel has not just been herself,” Ruthanne Dolezal said. “Her effectiveness in the causes of the African-American community would have been so much more viable, and she would have been more effective if she had just been honest with everybody.”
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