Rachel Dolezal says her “childhood was riddled with corporal punishment” in her new memoir, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World.
She writes of childhood chores that consisted of hard manual labor – clearing brush, pruning trees, excavating dandelion roots harvesting vegetables, pickling cucumbers, butchering elk, turning dog fur into yarn (yes, dog fur) and making yogurt. Her “dawn to dusk” workload implies her parents worked the children like slaves.
“It wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to call me an indentured servant,” she writes.
During a television interview in 2015, Dolezal (then president of Spokane, Wash., branch of the NAACP) walked away from a reporter who questioned if she was African American. Dolezal later acknowledged being born to white parents, but also said she identifies as black. Amid the controversy of her racial identity, her parents spoke out about Dolezal's upbringing.
“It’s become a habit for her perhaps to misrepresent us as backward or something like that,” Dolezal’s mother said in an ABC News interview after Dolezal’s race first became public.
Dolezal claims she began identifying as black as early as age 5, drawing herself using a brown crayon, but her parents say that's not true.
"I think there's a demonstration of being irrational and being disconnected from reality," Ruthanne Dolezal said in a 2015 interview with CNN.
The book, In Full Color, goes on to say when her mother and father decided to adopt, “as a way to avoid (or, at the very least, limit) paying taxes,” childcare fell to Dolezal.
Dolezal describes how she was forced into the role of mother to the four African American children her parents adopted. She rocked her brother Ezra back to sleep in the middle of the night and shopped for and prepared his food, she writes. On one occasion, she said she spent more than month alone in her room caring for Izaiah, the second child her parents adopted.
All children in the household suffered unusual punishment, according to Dolezal. She describes vomiting trying to down a large bowl of oatmeal, only to have her parents force her to eat the vomit-filled leftovers after school.
When the adopted children were young, Dolezal said her parents, Larry and Ruthanne, beat them with glue sticks “so often it began to seem more like a way for them to take out their frustrations when dealing with four crying babies than an actual disciplinary tool.” Dolezal said she and her biological brother were spanked with a wooden paddle, but glue sticks were used on the adopted children because redness “faded quickly” in case a social worker would drop in.
Later, she says her parents beat her siblings, who she said bare scars on their backs, with a “rubber-tipped baboon whip” used to drive cattle in South Africa.
“In the Dolezal family, you couldn’t always count on your parents to keep you safe.”
In a 2015 blog post, authored by someone with the same name as Rachel’s adopted sister, Ester Dolezal, says she supports her sister. The post also points a finger at certain members of her family, who “have lied in the name of religion.”
Rachel Dolezal also writes of near sexual misconduct by her father and molestation by her biological brother.
Her father and brother walked around nude “whenever they pleased.” When talking about her father’s daily appearance, she says “his penis … I saw it a lot.”
Despite her objections, her father liked to pat her on the butt, “especially in the evening right before bedtime … he would inevitably come in contact with my budding breasts, and it didn’t feel right to me,” she writes.
Dolezal says after a day spent picking huckleberries, her biological brother Joshua pinned her to the floor, pulled up her shirt and bra and sucked on her nipples. Later in the book, she says he “apologized for molesting me when we were younger, and I’d forgiven him.”
Joshua previously faced charges for sexually abusing a black child in the early 2000s, but those charges were dropped.
In 2014, Joshua published a book, Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging, in 2014 about searching for his identity, which included details from his childhood. While Joshua writes about falling away from his parent’s faith, he doesn’t describe them as the abusive, but rather describes many fond memories with them.
One account that's backed up in both books — In Full Color and Down from the Mountaintop — is an abusive image of Dolezal's ex-husband, Kevin Moore. Dolezal writes she wasn’t allowed to have "anything that belonged entirely" to her and she wasn't allowed to "go out on her own." Joshua writes how disturbed he was with his sister's husband during a visit and how he exchanged emails and phone calls with her, advising her to stand up for herself.
After Dolezal divorced Moore, she writes, "now for the first time in my life, I was truly owning who I was: a woman who was free, self-reliant, and yes, Black."
Dolezal said in a release she wrote the book to "advance the conversation about race" and to set the record straight about her life.
