Activist Who Identified Herself as Black Takes an African Name

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/us/dolezal-activist-identifies-as-black-african-name.html

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Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who came to national attention in 2015 for masquerading as an African-American while serving as an N.A.A.C.P. leader, has changed her name to one with African roots. According to court papers filed in Spokane County, Wash., a name-change petition by Ms. Dolezal was approved last year. She is now Nkechi Amare Diallo.

It was a search for a new job that helped her arrive at a new name. “My name had become poison in the business world,” she said in an interview this week from her home in Spokane.

A member of the Ibo tribe in southeastern Nigeria reached out to Ms. Dolezal in January 2016 with an unusual offering: the gift of a new name. (Nkechi means gift of God; Amare, possessing great strength; and Diallo, bold.) “The person who gave me the name really thought that I was a gift of God to spark conversation about race,” she said.

News of the change was only recently reported online; it is not clear who made the discovery. “I was kind of hoping to keep my name private,” she said. But now that it is out, she feels comfortable discussing it.

“This name is more indicative of who I am in meaning than my birth name,” she said. “It shows both an understanding and appreciation for the best characteristics of my life.”

Ms. Dolezal (pronounced DOLE-uh-zhal) was the president of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Spokane and a university instructor in African-American studies who had claimed for years that her heritage was partly black.

Her embrace of a racial identity she was not born or raised in quickly became the subject of national debate, and she lost her jobs. Read more »

Ms. Dolezal’s story unraveled after a private investigator discovered her parents in Montana. Her mother, Ruthanne Dolezal, described the family’s ancestry as overwhelmingly white.

“She is a very talented woman, doing work she believes in,” her father, Lawrence A. Dolezal, said in an interview. “Why can’t she do that as a Caucasian woman, which is what she is?”

In a New York Times report chronicling reactions to the discovery of Ms. Dolezal’s deception, blacks and liberals accused her of an offensive impersonation, part of a long history in which whites appropriated black heritage when it suited them.

Almost 1,500 Times readers responded in comments on that article:

In an opinion column, Charles M. Blow of The Times wrote that Ms. Dolezal’s deception was “a spectacular exercise in hubris, narcissism and deflection.”

In an essay on the Op-Ed page, Tamara Winfrey Harris wrote: “Racial identity cannot be fluid as long as the definition of whiteness is fixed. And historically, the path to whiteness has been extremely narrow.”

Daniel J. Sharfstein, the author of “The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America,” examined the nation’s porous racial boundaries in an article in The New York Times Magazine: “In a sense, the controversy surrounding Dolezal is a product of our own contradictory moment, when Americans are at once far more open to racial boundary-crossing and as preoccupied with those same boundaries as ever.”

Since 2015, Ms. Dolezal has been a volunteer for nonprofit groups: one that aims to reduce recidivism rates and poverty among blacks in the Caribbean, and another that lobbies for fair housing in Nevada. She has three sons and lives in Spokane; her memoir is expected to be published this month.