In February, The Easterner, the online student newspaper at Eastern Washington University, carried an interview with a black Africana studies professor.
At the time, the story told by Rachel Dolezal must have seemed remarkable – inspirational, even.
She had overcome a hellish childhood, marred by physical abuse to become a respected academic, president of the Spokane branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the oldest civil-rights movement in the country, and chair of the local Office of the Police Ombudsman.
Now, in the wake of the truth about Dolezal, a white fantasist who used make-up and Afro-styled hair to convince the world – and, perhaps, herself – that she was black, it is tempting to assume that many of the remarkable “facts” about her life were delusional fiction.
She had, she told the writer, been born in a tepee, her family had lived off the land, hunting their food with bows and arrows, and she and her siblings had been physically abused by her mother and stepfather while living in South Africa, beaten with “baboon whips” which, she said, were “pretty similar to what was used as whips during slavery”.
Dolezal’s extraordinary account of her younger life appeared to gain some credibility this week when it emerged that in 2014, her white biological brother, Joshua, now a college lecturer in Idaho and, at 39, two years her senior, had written a memoir describing their parents as two ex-hippies-turned-evangelists who had raised them in a strange, cult-like household.
On the other hand, Dolezal has since admitted she made up the tepee, and has never been to South Africa. But none of that explains her decision to pretend to be black, and why she continues to insist that: “I am definitely not white … Nothing about being white describes who I am.”
Dolezal’s story has triggered a fascinating and difficult debate about identity and self-determination. If it’s acceptable for a person to change their sexual orientation and gender, why shouldn’t they also be allowed to choose and change their racial identity?
After Dolezal bowed to mounting pressure on Monday and announced her resignation from the NAACP on Facebook, the 3,000-plus responses – many supporting the work she has done for the black community – not only reflected the confusion, bewilderment and anger engendered by her stance, but also raised difficult questions.
“I’m confused,” wrote one woman. “If it’s OK for Bruce Jenner to change his/her appearance and become [a] woman, then why can’t Rachel change her appearance and be black?”
Some said she needed mental help. Others drew attention to the countless men and women around the world who undergo plastic surgery, alter their hairstyles and either tan or bleach their skin to change their appearance – and thus their implied race – without any suggestion they were mad.
Through all this noise, some facts about Dolezal’s life have emerged, and with them a finer appreciation of the unorthodox upbringing that may have led her to lie to others and, eventually, to herself, about her racial orientation.
Rachel Anne Dolezal was born 100 per cent Caucasian in rural Lincoln County, Montana, on November 12, 1977, inheriting German, Swedish and Czech lineage from her parents, Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal.
The Dolezals are Young Earth Creationists, a fundamentalist offshoot of Christianity whose members believe the planet is only 6,000 years old and who take literally the Bible’s account of the beginning of the world.
Between 1993 and 1995, the Dolezals adopted four black children, three from the US and one from Haiti. This week, Dolezal’s father told the BBC his daughter had been “very heavily influenced by them … and that was the beginning of her journey to advocate on social-justice issues on behalf of African Americans”.
But also this week Dolezal told NBC's Today show she had identified herself as black from the age of 5 – more than a decade before Ezra, Izaiah, Esther and Zach joined the family.
“I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon, and with black curly hair,” she said. “That was how I was portraying myself.”
It’s another part of the story that doesn’t fit. Born in 1977, Dolezal would have been 16 by the time the first of the boys was adopted. And the claim was rubbish, her mother told Fox News.
“That did not happen,” she said. “She has never done anything like that as a child.” In 1996, three years after the first of the adopted children joined the family, Dolezal left home to study art at university in Jackson, Mississippi. From there she moved in 1999 to Washington DC, to continue her studies at the historically black Howard University, and graduated with a master’s degree in fine art.
At the time, she appears to have been living as a white person because several years later she tried to sue the university for discriminating against her in favour of African-American students when she applied for a teaching job. The claim was thrown out by a court in 2005.
In 2000, Dolezal married Kevin Moore, a black man. A photograph shows an apparently happy family – Dolezal, looking more like the all-white, blonde girl-next-door she appeared to be in her teens. The beaming couple is flanked by Dolezal’s smiling parents, with the four adopted children in the foreground.
This week Zach Dolezal told ABC News that his sister’s transformation was gradual. “It started with her hair, then she’d probably have a little darker tan,” he said. “It was very progressive.”
According to an interview Larry Dolezal gave the Huffington Post this week, in 2002 the Dolezals and their other children moved to South Africa, where Larry worked in Cape Town for Creation Ministries International.
Meanwhile, Kevin and Rachel had a son, Franklin. But in 2004, she filed for divorce, and that's where her story takes another curious and, for now, only vaguely understood turn. According to the New York Daily News, at some point in the few years after her divorce, Dolezal gained custody of her eldest adoptive brother, Izaiah, whom she now apparently treats as her son, and brought him to live with her as a teenager, first in Idaho and then Washington. She also stopped talking to her parents.
At the same time, she claimed that a black friend, Albert Wilkerson, was her “real dad”.
It's unclear what cataclysmic event or gradual erosion led to the breakdown of the family. Ruthanne told the media her daughter began to drift away in 2007, which was "when we started noticing hostility towards us". Now, she told New York Daily News, "it seems she believes that in order to identify with African Americans she must reject her biological Caucasian family".
While the media was trying to work out why Dolezal's parents had chosen to out her as white last week, triggering the global storm of interest in their daughter and her family, an answer suggested itself when the New York Daily News revealed that Dolezal's white brother, Joshua, is facing charges for an alleged sexual assault on one of his black siblings in 2001 or 2002.
According to Ruthanne, her daughter was behind the 2013 allegation, which was "a malicious false lie ", she told People magazine.
For her part, Dolezal said it was her support for the victim that had driven her parents to expose her racial deception, in an attempt to sabotage her credibility.
As grim as this twist to the story is, the alleged assault and its aftermath doesn’t explain why Dolezal embarked on her transformation from white to black.
Whatever triggered that, the process appears to have been complete by 2010, when Dolezal was hired by EWU as a professor in Africana studies programme. By now, photographs of her showed a woman with darkened skin and Afro-curled hair.
At the end of last year, Dolezal was elected president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. By January this year, she had seemingly become so confident that her racial deception was bulletproof that she posted a photograph of her “father”, Wilkerson, who would be coming to Spokane for the opening of the organisation’s new offices.
Sympathy for Dolezal has ebbed and flowed, and it hit a low when Spokane police said they were dropping inquiries into a series of allegations she had made over the past few years, that she had been the victim of hate crimes and had received a packet of racist mail at the NAACP office.
The implication, that she may have made up the allegations and even planted the package herself, appeared to provide further evidence of Dolezal’s apparent compulsion to fully act out the part she had invented for herself.
When confronted with the true identity of its star activist, the Spokane NAACP declared, nobly enough, that “one’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership”.
But that was missing the point, according to Jonathan Blanks, a white-looking writer, who is, in fact, the son of a black father and a white mother. Writing in The Washington Post on Tuesday, Blanks condemned what he called Dolezal's "historical fraud".
“Blackness isn’t a prerequisite for being an activist, ally or black-studies professor,” wrote Blanks, who can trace his familial roots back to slaves owned by white people in Mississippi.
“But the black community is one conceived in unimaginable trauma, and a large number still suffer the legacies of that trauma. To adopt this identity under false pretences is akin to faking a serious illness or childhood abuse to join a support group. Deeply felt empathy is not an entitlement to inclusion via false history.”