In her heart, she’s still a misunderstood black woman.
Rachel Dolezal — who convincingly passed as an African-American civil rights activist in Spokane, Washington, until her inarguably Caucasian parents outed her as white in 2015 — is now stepping back into the spotlight in all her bottle-bronzed, afro-hair-extensioned glory.
Dolezal has penned a memoir in which she compares her travails to slavery and describes her harrowing childhood as a pale, blond girl growing up poor on the side of a Montana mountain.
As she toiled in the garden for her strict, Evangelical parents, she’d dream of freeing her inner blackness, Dolezal writes in “In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World.”
See, she’d read her grandmother’s National Geographic magazines. So she knew about blackness.
“I’d stir the water from the hose into the earth … and make thin, soupy mud, which I would then rub on my hands, arms, feet, and legs,” Dolezal writes.
“I would pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo … imagining I was a different person living in a different place was one of the few ways … that I could escape the oppressive environment I was raised in.”
She was so poor, she wore dog-fur clothing and played ball with freshly butchered chicken heads, she writes.
Blessed freedom would come.
But first, she had to survive her parents’ beatings, her brother’s molestation and her own wheat-pale skin and hair.
Was Dolezal really assaulted by her brother? Did her parents really force her to eat her own vomit, and was she really born in a teepee?
With so much of her life a blatant fiction, it’s hard to be sure — but it all sure makes for fascinating reading.
Who knew, for example, that Dolezal is a bisexual who suffers from PTSD?
On a brisk November morning in 1977, Rachel Anne Dolezal came kicking and screaming into a “painfully white world” she’d eventually grow to despise and discard.
It may or may not have been in a teepee, but Jesus Christ was indeed listed as the witness on her birth certificate — Dolezal includes a photo of the document in her book.
Life in the rural Northwest, near the banks of the Kootenai River, was bleak for a young Dolezal.
‘I usually picked a brown crayon rather than a peach one. Peach simply didn’t resonate with me.’
She claims she wore clothes made from dog fur and elk antlers and for fun, she and her brother Josh would play “chicken head baseball”— propelling freshly butchered chicken heads across their yard with a metal bat.
Her family was a pack of “Jesus freaks” — religious fanatics who didn’t allow television and would beat her with a paddle for infractions as small as breaking a dish.
Her dad often walked around the house nude, his penis an unfortunate, frequent sight.
She claims she was once forced to eat her own vomit after she couldn’t finish a bowl of oatmeal. And that her own brother molested her when she was 12 — pinning her down and sucking on her nipples one harrowing afternoon after a day of picking huckleberries.
She felt black for as long as she could remember, she writes. When drawing a self-portrait, she drew a “brown-skinned girl with black curly braids.”
“I usually picked a brown crayon rather than a peach one. Peach simply didn’t resonate with me,” Dolezal claimed.
With platinum blond hair, sea-foam eyes and patches of freckles splayed across her fair skin, Dolezal was everything but black.
She didn’t even meet a black person until she was 10.
Still, “the feeling that I was somehow different from [my family] persisted. I felt black and saw myself as black.”
When Dolezal’s parents adopted four black children — solely for the tax deductions, she writes — she took on a maternal role and grew extremely close to her new siblings.
“I found myself drawing closer to something that felt oddly familiar,” she writes.
“For the first time in my life, I felt like I was truly part of a family.”
Dolezal started to teach her siblings about black culture and history and “a funny thing happened. I began to feel even more connected to it myself.”
She became enamored with black culture and history and her artwork almost exclusively featured African-American depictions.
When she was 17, she had the opportunity to travel to Washington, DC, during summer break and work for a family friend’s fine-art greeting card company.
She complained the job consisted mostly of being a nanny and a cook.
Thankfully, she writes, the autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a famous slave who lived through emancipation, provided her with “much needed solace.”
“I could still relate to aspects of her struggle. I certainly wasn’t enslaved … but it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to call me an indentured servant,” Dolezal claims.
“Miss Pittman’s plight and her perseverance resonated with me. I knew what it was like to be a child and have to work as hard as an adult, and how it felt to be used and abused.
“I also understood the pain that comes from being treated like less than a full human being … and the fortitude required to fight this sort of injustice.”
Dolezal escaped rural Montana for a small college in Jackson, Mississippi, and her inner blackness flourished.
She “was soon living something of a double life.”
She spent her week living on campus with a blond, blue-eyed ballet dancer roommate and her weekends attending an all-black church.
“As I got more involved with the [Black Student Association], campus activism, and my artwork, the more Afrocentric my appearance became,” Dolezal wrote.
She started wearing her hair in box braids and sporting brightly colored dashikis. People started to question.
“Most people didn’t know what to make of me. ‘So what are you?’ I was asked all too often,” Dolezal wrote.
“It became easier for me to let them make assumptions about me. I noticed how much more relaxed and comfortable Black people who assumed I was Black were around me.”
She moved to the “poor Black side” of town and started to be treated “as a member of the community.”
“I would laugh at jokes told at the expense of white people and lodge some pretty fierce critiques about white culture myself,” Dolezal wrote.
“I felt less like I was adopting a new identity and more like I was unveiling one that had been there all along. Finally able to embrace my true self, I allowed the little girl I’d colored with a brown crayon so long ago to emerge.”
And emerge it did. For a brief time, at least.
Ironically, her new black husband, whom she met in Mississippi, wanted her to look as white as possible.
She said re-crossing the color line was as easy as “untwisting my braids” and “staying out of the sun,” so at her husband’s request, she did just that, quietly turning back into a white woman.
But clearly, this was a U-turn, a wrong-way detour from her true path.
She eventually left her husband and moved in with an uncle in a lake town in Idaho.
During that time, she was diagnosed with PTSD, explored her bisexuality and “once again embraced my inclination toward Black aesthetics.”
When people assumed she was black, she “made no effort to set them straight.”
“For the first time in my life, I was truly owning who I was: a woman who was free, self-reliant, and, yes, Black.”
As a professor at North Idaho College and Eastern Washington University, and a director of the local Human Rights Education Institute, she began what she calls the happiest and most fulfilling time of her life.
“I was a Black-Is-Beautiful, Black liberation movement, fully conscious, woke soul sista,” she writes.
“Finally allowed to bloom, I blossomed fast.”
Now all she needed was to grow her very own black family. She already had Franklin, 7, her mixed-race child from marriage.
But when Dolezal’s now-teenage adopted brother Izaiah asked to live with her — so as to escape the beatings and deprivations of the Montana farm — she leaped at the chance.
People would notice the difference in her sons’ skin tones and ask if they had different dads. Dolezal would explain, “yes, Izaiah looks like his dad and Franklin looks like me.”
She wrote it was technically a “true statement” and was “a clever way of telling the truth without spelling out all the details.”
She called it “creative nonfiction.”
After Izaiah moved in, Dolezal said she never wore her hair “unaltered” in public.
“I consciously maintained some warmth of color in my skin … through sunbathing or bronzer sprays. I’d already been identified by the media and other people as Black or biracial countless times, so it wasn’t hard for me to go one step further and fully commit to a look that made visual sense to people who knew me as Izaiah’s mom.”
In 2014 she became president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, just across the Idaho border in Washington state.
Dolezal distanced herself from people who knew her as a child and “made an entirely new set of friends and connections.”
Then, on June 11, 2015, everything changed.
Dolezal made a never-substantiated claim of receiving a series of racial threats in the NAACP chapter’s mailbox. Local reporters began to dig, eventually contacting her parents in Montana.
Dolezal lost every job she had, almost all of her friends and within a couple of days, her life was unrecognizable. At some points, she contemplated suicide and “might have actually done it” if it wasn’t for her family.
Today, Dolezal remains “unapologetically Black” and insists race is a social construct with no biological origins.
“For me, Blackness is more than a set of racialized physical features. It involves acknowledging our common human ancestry with roots in Africa,” Dolezal explains in the epilogue of her memoir.
She said she wasn’t just “masquerading” as a black woman — it was part of her identity.
“Just as a transgender person might be born male but identify as female, I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t but expressing something I already was. I wasn’t passing as Black; I was Black, and there was no going back.”