How black is Rachel Dolezal? According to Dolezal herself, so black that she was too black for her first husband, who just happened to be African-American.
That hilarious statement emanates from Dolezal’s new memoir: In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. Dolezal writes that her fantasies of being black started in childhood:
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.”
Determined to be black, Dolezal claims, she rubbed mud on her hands, arms, feet and legs.
Dolezal’s first husband was Kevin Moore, whom she married in 2000. He was a medical student at Howard University. They had a son in 2002; they divorced in 2004.
Moore later accused Dolezal of “poisoning” his relationship with their son. Moore wrote a note to Dolezal in 2005 in which he said she made some strange comments to their three-year-old son. Moore wrote, “He mentioned that you stated something … about ‘handcuffs’ and something about ‘me never seeing him again. He also stated that you said I have ‘monsters’ in my house … I hate to think you may be just sitting at home thinking of bad and erroneous things to say about me to Franklin.”
Dolezal’s mother. Ruthanne, acknowledged the family’s ancestry is Czech, Swedish and German with “faint traces” of Native American heritage.