By all accounts Rachel Dolezal is a successful Black woman, community activist and educator. She is president of the Spokane NAACP, sits on a police oversight committee and teaches Africana studies at Eastern Washington University. She has been committed to the civil rights struggle for well over 20 years and is widely known as having been the alleged victim of multiple hate crime attacks. But there was a secret she was hiding that her parents could hold no longer. Her estranged father, Larry Dolezal, wants it to be known that he and her mother are both White. “She’s our birth daughter and we’re both of European descent. We’re puzzled and it’s very sad. She has over the past 10 years assimilated herself into the African American community through her various advocacies and social justice work, and so that may be part of the answer,” he said.
Rachel Dolezal’s deception went pretty deep. According to multiple sources, including her parents, she has been passing off her adopted Black brother as her son and an unidentified Black man as her father. The public scandal has even initiated an investigation by Spokane City Hall, because of an application to the Office of Police Ombudsman Commission in which Dolezal identified several ethnic origins, including white, Black and American Indian. In a joint statement Spokane Mayor David Condon and Council President Ben Stuckart said, “We are gathering facts to determine if any city policies related to volunteer boards and commissions have been violated. That information will be reviewed by the City Council, which has oversight of city boards and commissions.”
Dolezal’s background came under increased scrutiny because of a recent incident where a hate mail package was placed in the locked mailbox of the Spokane NAACP addressed to Dolezal. The handwriting on the package matched several other hate mail packages received. But the post office stated that there were no USPS date stamps or bar code so it was unlikely that the package was processed by the post office. Dolezal received a key to the post office box when she became president of the NAACP earlier this year and there are implications swirling. Dolezal was asked about the implication that she planted the package and she responded to media, “That’s such bull—-. What mother would terrorize her own children? Nobody’s ever come out and said (they suspect me) directly, but I am bothered by the subtle implication.”
