US activist pretended to be African American for nearly a decade

US activist pretended to be African American for nearly a decade. June. 15, 2015 07:05. snow@donga.com.

It has turned out that an influential human rights activist who had taken the initiative in human rights of African American has pretended to be black for a long time, which is sending tremendous shockwave through American society. “The head of a NAACP chapter in Washington state is Caucasian but has been misidentifying herself as at least part African-American,” CNN reported on Friday.

The skin of Rachel Dolezal, a bigshot in black community in northwest America, speaks for itself that she is a black person. Early this year, she posted a photo with a black middle-aged man on her Facebook whom she contends to be her “father”. Her resume, which she submitted when she was taking the chair of the office of the police ombudsman commission in Spokane, clearly says that she is “black.”

The fact that she is actually a white woman was revealed as her biological parents who have not contacted with her daughter exposed Dolezal’s racial identity. “She is a European-decent white person. We are her birth parents”, her parents said on Thursday while showing photos of Dolezal in childhood. “She told me not to blow her cover about the fact that she had this secret life or alternate identity,” said Ezra Dolezal, an adopted brother of Rachel at the interview with CNN on Saturday.

She began to disguise as an African American between 2006 and 2007. “She lost herself in the conception that all the white people are racist. From that point, she seemed to consider herself a black woman. After 2011, she completely disguised her appearance to look like a Black American,” said Isaiah Dolezal, her another brother. Her parents think that it is because of too much interest of her in ethnicity. “It seems that she has deeply involved in black community and culture since 2007 when she transferred to Howard University where a lot of black students go,” her father, Lawrence Dolezal, recalled.

Some presume that she began pretending to be an African American to take a guardian role for her younger brother who requested to be separated from his step parents by reason of physical abuse by one of the parents.

When asked “Are your parents -- are they white?” in an interview with local network on Friday, she avoided immediate answer by saying “I don`t understand the question of.”