The adopted brother of Rachel Dolezal has accused her of giving African Americans a “slap in the face” by co-opting their racial struggles after growing up with all the advantages of a white, middle-class girl.
“She puts dark make-up on her face and says she black,” Ezra Dolezal told Buzzfeed News. “It’s basically blackface.”
The 22-year-old soldier, who described himself to the Washington Post as “25% black”, spoke out after his white adoptive parents this week outed their biological daughter as a white woman.
He also said Rachel Dolezal had told him “don’t blow my cover” when he went to visit her after she moved to Spokane, Washington, where she is president of the local chapter of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
On Saturday, KHQ-TV in Spokane reported that Rachel Dolezal said she would speak about the furore at a Monday meeting of the group. On Friday, police said they were suspending investigations into racial harassment complaints filed by Dolezal, including one from earlier this year in which she said she received hate mail.
Dolezal, 37, is a professor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University, where she specialises in black studies and African American culture. She has spoken regularly on local media about racial justice and was last year appointed to Spokane’s police oversight committee, after indicating on her application that her racial background was white, African American and Native American.
But on Thursday, reports began to emerge contradicting Dolezal’s professed racial identity. She has since found herself at the centre of an international media storm over her ethnic misrepresentation.
Ezra Dolezal told Buzzfeed News he first began to notice a change in his sister about six years ago, after she first moved to Spokane, when she increased the range of hair products she used. From 2011 she began applying make-up to her face to appear “darker and darker”, he said.
“She just told me, ‘Over here, I’m going to be considered black, and I have a black father. Don’t blow my cover’,” he said.
Another adopted brother, Zach Dolezal, told the Washington Post she had also told him not to refer to her white parents.
Rachel Dolezal claimed her black adopted brother, Izaiah, as her son after she became estranged from her parents, Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal. She obtained legal custody of the 21-year-old in 2011, amid an apparent split from her family.
Ezra Dolezal said his sister had brainwashed Izaiah into hating white people. He told the Washington Post: “She turned Izaiah kind of racist. Told Izaiah all this stuff about white people, made him really racist toward white people.”
Zach Dolezal told the Washington Post: “I can understand hairstyles and all that. Saying her brother is her son, I don’t understand that.”
Rachel Dolezal had been living in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where she was education director of the Human Rights Education Institute. Maureen Dolan, a reporter with the Coeur d’Alene Press, one of the first papers to break the story of Rachel Dolezal’s race-swap, said she watched as the white woman she first met appeared to transform over the years.
“When I met Rachel several years ago I honestly believed she was Caucasian,” Dolan told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday morning. “But the reality is her appearance changed and within several years her colour, her skin tone changed, her complexion changed, the way she wore her hair changed.”
Despite her efforts at transformation, it appears that doubts about Rachel Dolezal’s professed ethnicity have been expressed for some time. A second Buzzfeed News story cited comments beneath articles in a range of online publications where readers had accused her off passing herself off as black.
A story in the Boise Weekly, from Idaho, reported a complaint Dolezal made about finding a noose hanging at her home. Beneath it one reader wrote: “How in the world can she expect justice to be served when she cannot tell the truth about her own ethnicity? Her parents are white, her grandparents are white, she is white.”
A 2010 story in the Coeur d’Alene Press reported Dolezal’s resignation from the town’s Human Rights Education Institute.
A comment said: “The people who have known Rachel for years do not like seeing her fraudulently passing herself off as ‘black’ for the sake of ‘the cause’.” The comment also criticised Dolan, who wrote the story, for failing to find out Dolezal’s true ethnicity.
Dolezal hinted at her self-appointed racial identity in another Coeur d’Alene Press story, published in 2009, where she described herself as “trans-racial” – a description that with hindsight could be seen as similar to transgender.
“I’m trans-racial, my son’s trans-racial, my roommate is African American,” she said.
The Guardian was unable to locate the original story, which was cited by Buzzfeed News.
Dolan said she was finally prompted to investigate and publish a story about Dolezal’s ethnicity after people from Spokane contacted her paper with concerns about how Dolezal was representing herself.
“People in the black community … are upset because she is a person who’s actually able to back away from being black,” Dolan said. “It’s a white privilege issue they say. She has the option, when most people don’t if you’re actually a black person.
“Anybody of any colour can be the head of a social justice organisation. However if you’re not a black African American and you fill out an application and say that you are a black African American when race is a consideration for that position that might be a problem.
“There might be other people who are actually black African Americans who don’t get that position because of that.”