Local NAACP leader has been falsely calling herself black, family says

Rachel Dolezal, 37, is the president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP, a part-time professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University, a graduate of historically black Howard University — and she's white, according to her parents and adoptive siblings.

"It is very disturbing that she has become so dishonest," Dolezal's mother, Ruthanne Dolezal, told The Coeur d'Alene Press in Montana, where she and her husband, Larry Dolezal live, and where they say Rachel grew up. "We are saddened she has chosen to misrepresent her ethnicity," said Larry Dolezal. The mother described her daughter's ethnic background as German, Czech, and Swedish, with “faint traces” of Native American mixed in.

Rachel Dolezal, in an application for a volunteer Spokane city police oversight board, checked off boxes for white, Native American, and African-American. She has maintained that her father is black, and that Larry Dolezal is her stepfather — a claim her mother strongly disputes but one she stood by in this interview with local TV station KXLY4 on Thursday:

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In a Thursday interview with The Spokesman-Review, Dolezal wouldn't answer a direct question about her race, saying "I feel like I owe my executive committee a conversation" before publicly addressing the "multi-layered" issue. "There's a lot of complexities... and I don't know that everyone would understand that,” she said, adding, when pressed: "We're all from the African continent." James Wilburn, who is black and the previous president of the Spokane NAACP, said being black isn't necessary to head the chapter, and in fact, past presidents and at least half of the Spokane chapter are white. "And that is probably a result of the fact that only 1.9 percent of the population in Spokane is African-American," he told The Coeur d'Alene Press.