ArcaMax

Perhaps we African-Americans should feel flattered that Rachel Dolezal wanted so desperately to be one of us.

Or maybe we should feel insulted, as some of her critics say, by her demonstration of white privilege even as she boldly lived a life of opposition to it.

You know who I'm talking about. Everybody's been talking about Dolezal, the 37-year-old president of the Spokane NAACP chapter who resigned Monday after she was outed by her own parents as a white woman who had been masquerading as black for 10 years.

Obviously there are a lot of complicated issues going on between Dolezal and her parents, who quite clearly are white. But, out of all the intriguing questions that Dolezal's chosen lifestyle raise for the rest of us, the biggest was asked by her father in an NBC interview: "She's a very talented woman doing work she believes in. Why can't she do that as a Caucasian woman?"

Why indeed? Not that there's anything wrong with that, as far as the rest of us are concerned. Blacks and whites have worked together in the NAACP since its founding more than 100 years ago. Why did she have to lie about her race?

Ever since she was kindergarten age she has identified with African-Americans, she told Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today Show." She recalled how at age 5 she "drew self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon."

Yet her brother Ezra, an adopted African-American sibling, told Buzzfeed News that she was made to feel ostracized and discriminated against at historically black Howard University, where she received a master's degree in fine art and also filed an unsuccessful discrimination suit against the university.

Earlier this year, her racial transformation came to light after she was accused of falsifying reports of multiple hate crimes in Spokane. In February Dolezal told local police and news reporters in Spokane that she found an envelope containing threatening mail in the civil rights group's post office box.

But detectives determined that lack of a postal cancelation, time stamp or bar code on the envelope indicated it had not come through the postal system. More likely, police said, it was planted by someone who possessed the chapter's postal key.

In her online bio, Dolezal, who teaches classes at Eastern Washington University, describes being the victim of "at least eight documented hate crimes (targeting her) and her children during her residency in North Idaho."

...continued

(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.