In Full Color Page 24

  “What do you say to the folks who say maybe you put that letter in there because you were one of the people who had a key to do so?”

  I was momentarily stunned speechless. There’s a long history of Black Americans being vilified by the press, hate crimes aimed at them going unsolved, and, in some cases, guilt being placed on the victims of the crimes instead of the perpetrators. In this moment, as Humphrey essentially accused me of perpetrating hate crimes against myself, all these injustices came to mind. His cavalier attitude and contemptible insinuations angered me. He was so smug and condescending I considered ending the interview but continued because I felt it was my responsibility as the OPOC chair and NAACP president to let people know when justice wasn’t being delivered.

  “I don’t even know that I have any words for them,” I finally managed to say, doing my best to control my anger. “Because as a mother of two Black sons, I would never terrorize my children, and I don’t know any mother personally who would trump up or fabricate something that severe that would affect her kids. My son slept for two weeks in my bed after we received that particular package, and he’s thirteen years old.” Thinking about how upset Franklin had been nearly made me cry. “That’s the kind of terror that I as a mother and my son as a Black male, a thirteen-year-old in Spokane, never needs to experience. And the slightest implication that I would perpetrate terror toward my kids is at best offensive, but . . .” I was so mad it took all my focus to stay on point and complete my thought. “I don’t know how that could be a conscionable statement that anybody could live with or believe.”

  Seeing that I was upset, Humphrey toned down his rhetoric. “Rachel, despite these threats that started many years ago, you continue to go out and fight for equality and civil rights and you’re not going to be scared off from doing this.”

  “No, I’m not. This is actually something I’ve cared about since I was a young child, and I’ve been involved with social justice work since middle school, high school, college. It’s part of my life work so . . . I’ve heard some people say, ‘Oh, you get publicity from these hate crimes,’ and I think that’s very sick as well because that’s not the kind of publicity anyone wants. It’s publicity of a negative and terrorizing scenario, especially death threats and photos of lynchings. As a Black Studies professor, I know what these images mean and take them very seriously, given the history of racism in the United States.”

  There was much more I wanted to say. I wanted to ask him how he would feel if someone accused him of doing something analogous. But he barely let me finish my sentence before he asked, “Speaking of that, did your dad ever make it to Spokane in January for the ribbon cutting?”

  It was an odd segue from the discussion we’d been having. The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the NAACP’s new office had taken place six months before, so why was he bringing it up now? And what did that have to do with hate crimes? I was a little confused. And very annoyed.

  “No, actually,” I responded, hoping we’d come to the end of the interview. “Unfortunately, he has bone cancer and was not able to get cleared for surgery yet.”

  In the heat of the moment I misspoke. Albert was actually suffering from prostate cancer and was scheduled to have surgery on the bones in his leg, and I conflated the two. Not that it was any of this guy’s business. Albert was a very private person, particularly about his health, and I immediately felt bad sharing this information with a reporter.

  Humphrey pulled out a photograph of Albert. Despite wearing dirty white sneakers that looked even shabbier next to my black Nine West heels, Humphrey literally looked down his nose at me as he pointed at the photo. The vibe I was getting from him was a mix of smugness and disdain.

  “Is that your dad?” he asked.

  I recognized the picture of Albert from my Facebook account. Why had this reporter been snooping around there? I couldn’t believe how unprofessional he was being. When I’d agreed to do this interview, it was with the understanding that we’d be discussing the fact that, once again, the Spokane police had closed a hate crime investigation after failing to find a suspect.

  As confused as I was by Humphrey’s question, it was easy to answer. “Yes, that’s my dad.”

  He pointed at the photograph again. “This man right here is your father?”

  Somehow a serious discussion about hate crimes had shifted to an examination of my private life. It felt like I was walking into a trap, so I pushed back a little. “Do you have a question about that?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I was wondering if your dad is really an African American man?”

  I wish I’d been able to steer the conversation back to the issue I’d agreed to discuss, but his question had thrown me off balance. It was becoming clear that this man knew something about my background and that was a little scary. Why was he prying into my private affairs? Whatever the reason it couldn’t possibly be good.

  “That’s a very—I mean, I don’t know what you’re implying.”

  I knew exactly what he was implying, but after watching him tiptoe around the subject I wasn’t about to help him get there any quicker.

  “Are you African American?”

  And there it was. That’s what this was all about. His question put me in an impossible situation. I knew any answer I gave could be used to ruin my credibility. If I said yes, I’d be asked to prove it. If I said no, I’d be tried in the court of public opinion for how I’d been identifying on and off since my college days. The idea that my reputation might be damaged because of this bothered me but not the way you probably assume. I’d never had any sort of job security or financial stability so in that regard I didn’t have all that much to lose, but I was frightened about the prospect of people no longer seeing me for who I was and I was even more concerned how this “news” might affect my two sons and baby sister. Esther would be arriving at the coffee shop any minute and I was scared that if I said the wrong thing it might ruin my credibility as the key witness in her case against Josh.

  I was also enraged by Humphrey’s adversarial tone. I wanted to slap the smug grin right off his face. There was a long, awkward pause as I made myself hold my tongue—and my hands—in check. I told myself to calm down and be professional. It wasn’t easy. I felt cornered, and his snide tone convinced me that anything I said could and would be used against me. If I could have pled the Fifth, I would have. Instead I said, “I don’t understand the question. I did tell you that, yes, that’s my dad, and he was unable to come in January.”

  Out of the entire twenty-minute-long interview, “I don’t understand the question” would be the one sentence people would remember most. My uttering it would be transformed into countless Vines and memes online, quickly supplanting the popularity of Lucille Bluth, the snobby mother on Arrested Development, uttering the same phrase in response to a waitress in a kid-friendly diner asking her, “Plate or platter?” For me, that sentence contained much more defiance than humor. I didn’t understand—or want to endorse—the relevance of these personal questions to the very public matter of hate and terror being allowed to spread in our community.

  Beyond this, in my scholarly circles, “African American” specifically referred to Americans whose ancestors were taken from Africa and enslaved in the United States. When used as a catchall term for Black Americans, however, it often caused confusion. For example, there were significant cultural and identity differences between someone who was born in, say, Kenya and voluntarily emigrated to the United States and a Black American who was a descendant of slaves, but both might be called African Americans. For this reason, I preferred “Black,” a much broader term that denotes a connection to the Pan-African Diaspora. “Pan,” of course, denotes inclusion and unity, which I found apt, as I’d always considered myself part of this movement.

  The reporter pressed me. “Are your parents, are they white?”

  I’d had enough. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Esther walking into the Starbucks. Hoping Humphrey and his cameraman would
clear out of the area before they caught sight of her and—who knows?—started digging into her personal life as well, I did an abrupt about-face, walked in the opposite direction of the coffee shop, and ducked inside a Lululemon Athletica store. When the film crew finally left, I joined Esther at a table inside the coffee shop and vented. I was pissed off at the reporter for not being straightforward with me about what his true intentions for the interview were. I was upset about what sort of impact the footage was going to have on my standing in the community, my sense of identity, and my family. But I was most concerned about how it would affect Esther. The reporter had told me that he’d spoken with Larry and Ruthanne and was clearly on a mission to sully my reputation, so I knew the fallout from his investigation couldn’t possibly be good for her case.

  I went to bed that night with an awful sense of foreboding, and it was confirmed when I woke up the next morning. Izaiah turned twenty-one that day, and when I knocked on his bedroom door to wish him a happy birthday he relayed the news to me: the Coeur d’Alene Press had published its story about my racial identity during the night, and everyone was talking about it. His friends from high school had been calling him all morning, saying things like, “You lied to us!” and “That’s not your real mom!” The exact situation we were hoping to prevent—Izaiah having to deal with the awkward stigma of having been adopted twice—had occurred, and it nearly broke my heart.

  Like Esther, Izaiah rarely cried, but he did that morning. “Can someone just call and wish me a happy birthday?” he asked, as he slumped on the couch with his head in his hands.

  When I looked at my phone, any hope I’d had that this story might stay under the radar was destroyed. It was only 8 AM, but I’d already gotten more than twenty texts and voicemail messages, all of which said nearly the same thing. People wanted me to explain myself to them. They said they felt shocked and betrayed. They were confused. They were angry. A few of my friends reached out to make sure I was doing all right, but they were the minority. Many more people, who I’d once considered friends, told me they no longer wanted to have anything to do with me.

  The initial wave of messages was a trickle compared to the tsunami that was coming. Over the course of the next four days I would receive hundreds, maybe even thousands, of emails and direct messages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, so many I quickly gave up trying to respond to them. My voicemail box kept filling up within hours of me checking and erasing my messages. When it became clear that I’d never be able to keep pace with the barrage of incoming calls, I gave up and turned off my phone. There was simply no way I could have replied to everyone who contacted me, much less appease them.

  As overwhelmed and heartbroken as I was by the way my life was being dissected and my reputation destroyed, I knew I needed to focus my energy on protecting my sons and my sister. Izaiah seemed to take it the hardest. He said that he didn’t see any way forward for me and that he would understand if I needed to leave the country and disappear for a while. I was pretty sure he didn’t mean that and I was positive Franklin wouldn’t be fine with the idea, but I was touched that, after his bid to escape his past had failed, he was more concerned about my welfare than his own. He asked me what I was going to do, and when I told him I was going to find a way through this ordeal, he said, “You’re the bravest person I know.”

  Esther was also worried about how the news would affect me but wasn’t initially concerned about it having an impact on her case against Josh. After all, it was her bid for justice, not mine. Her response to the growing media frenzy was to lie low and not talk to anyone, particularly reporters, about what was going on. Only after several days had passed did she open up about her feelings. “It amazes me how fast people are willing to tear down someone who has worked very hard to get where they are,” she wrote on her blog. “It amazes me how, after all these years, and the civil rights movement, it still comes down to what color someone is . . . For something that is making a difference, someone that is making positive changes in this messed up world, why would someone want to stop the good work they are doing? Why would someone want to reverse the positivity that has been created? Why does everything have to come down to race?”

  Perhaps because of his age and his inherent optimism, Franklin took the news much better. He hugged Izaiah and me and assured us that everything would be okay, that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, that it would all blow over soon. “We might as well have fun with this!” he said as he took his cat October outside, sat with her on the front stoop, and posed for the television cameras that were starting to arrive. Only later would he come to realize just how big of an impact the story was going to have.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Unemployed

  THE MORNING THE ARTICLE ABOUT ME went online was extremely stressful for me, but it was practically a meditation retreat compared to the afternoon. KXLY posted footage of my awkward interview with Jeff Humphrey on its website around 3 PM. From there it was uploaded onto YouTube. And from there it went viral. Within hours, I became an internet sensation, widely lampooned for my perceived fraudulence. My story was the subject of hundreds of online news stories and made it onto the front pages of respected news outlets across the country and several places overseas. If I’d lit myself on fire and started running down the street, I couldn’t have created a bigger uproar.

  I found some comfort when NAACP state area president Gerald Hankerson called me that afternoon and, after expressing some incredulity about my situation, assured me that I’d sparked the perfect debate about race and not to worry, everything would be all right. He also told me that I shouldn’t speak to the press, that he and the national president, Cornell William Brooks, would handle that. The NAACP has a clear chain of command. Local chapter presidents answer to the state area presidents, who answer to the regional presidents, who answer to the national president. Respecting the protocol, I did as I was told.

  The next day, June 12, the NAACP issued an official press release that indicated it had my back and encouraged me to think I might be able to keep my job. “NAACP Spokane Washington Branch President Rachel Doležal is enduring a legal issue with her family, and we respect her privacy in this matter,” it read. “One’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership. The NAACP Alaska–Oregon–Washington State Conference stands behind Ms. Doležal’s advocacy record.”

  That was the only good news I received that day. In early May, the members of EWU’s BSU had voted on who they wanted to be the keynote speaker at the Africana Education graduation. I was unanimously selected and very excited to do it. The graduation ceremony was scheduled for the evening of Friday, June 12. That morning, my supervisor at EWU, Dr. Scott Finnie, called me to ask if I was still planning on speaking.

  “If the students want me to do it,” I told him, “I’ll be there.”

  I then contacted the BSU leaders and asked them what they thought I should do.

  “Of course we still want you to do it,” they said.

  I relayed the news to Dr. Finnie.

  Amidst all the chaos surrounding me, at least I had this to look forward to. It was important to me that I be at my students’ graduation to express my appreciation for all the hard work they’d done and to send them out into the world feeling supported, inspired, and loved. I’d done much more than simply teach these students. I’d mentored them, helped them file discrimination complaints, braided their hair, and stood alongside them protesting police brutality and racial injustice. The speech I was scheduled to give that evening was my opportunity to give them the sendoff they deserved.

  But when Dr. Finnie called back, he told me that the school’s administration had asked him to relay a message: I wasn’t going to be speaking at graduation, nor was I even to set foot on campus. The most devastating aspect of the furor surrounding my identity was the impact it had on my sons and my sister, but this was a close second. I’d known some of these students all four years they’d be
en in college, and I wasn’t even allowed to say goodbye to them.

  Following Gerald Hankerson’s orders, I made no official statements to the press in my capacity as the local NAACP chapter president on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. But on Sunday I had a meeting with our executive committee, during which its members made it known that they wanted me to address the issues at hand, namely my identity and parentage, at the general membership meeting the next day. I told them my hands were tied. Cornell Brooks had told me to cancel the meeting and wait until Thursday to say anything publicly. He was launching a new NAACP initiative called Journey for Justice the same day as our meeting, and he didn’t want my situation overshadowing its unveiling in the press. Knowing the local membership wouldn’t like this proposed plan, I asked him to reconsider, but Brooks backed up his command with a little muscle, telling me that if I didn’t cancel the meeting by noon on Monday he would revoke our chapter’s charter. When I explained this to the executive committee, they were up in arms. Their attitude was, basically, who is he to tell us how to run our local branch?

  With my executive committee going rogue, unwilling to follow one of the NAACP’s most fundamental rules—deference to the national president—I knew I could no longer lead the Spokane chapter. In the past six months, I’d worked my butt off to save it from losing its charter. Before I took office, the chapter had fewer than fifty members, only sixteen dollars in the bank, and just a single committee. Just a few months after I took over as president, it had more than two hundred members, its finances were well into the black, and it had eight committees. After all I’d done, I couldn’t just stand by and watch the chapter lose its charter because of an internal collapse or an external shutdown. I decided to resign instead.

  After I got home from the executive committee meeting on Sunday night and discussed the issue with Izaiah and Franklin, I emailed a letter of resignation to the executive committee, asking them to respect the leadership of the vice president I had appointed in January, Naima Quarles-Burnley. Quitting brought me a lot of pain and sadness. It didn’t hurt because I lost a title or a line on my résumé. It hurt because it meant that I wouldn’t be able to finish the work I’d started and that I’d be cut off from all the people I’d been trying to help.