I didn’t have long to grieve the loss of my NAACP position. The next day, the editor of The Inlander, the local weekly newspaper for which I’d been writing part-time, posted an editorial online that mentioned the fact that I was no longer affiliated with it: I’d been fired. This was news to me! The editor hadn’t reached out to me to let me know, but instead chose the coward’s way, crucifying me in print and basically calling himself dumb for hiring me. Although the income I got for writing for The Inlander was negligible—a hundred dollars a month—before Sandy Williams started The Black Lens it had given me a platform to write about racial injustice and police accountability, and I was going to miss having such an outlet for my voice.
That same day, I found out that the investigation into the complaint Rebekah Hollwedel had made against me and two of my fellow OPOC commissioners in April had suddenly gained traction. The legal team from Winston & Cashatt, the law firm the city hired to look into the allegations, wrapped up their investigation on June 5 but didn’t release their report until the day I resigned my position with the NAACP, when public opposition to me was at a fever pitch. One of the conclusions the report came to was that Kevin, Adrian, and I had “harassed Rebekah Hollwedel in the workplace by collectively and individually creating an intimidating, hostile, and offensive environment.” It also accused us of altering the minutes of our meetings, calling it a breach of ethics. What their report failed to mention was that most of the alterations were related to fixing grammatical errors and inserting items that we’d covered in the meetings but that Rebekah’s minutes failed to include.
The furor surrounding my racial identity provided city officials with the perfect smokescreen to distract people’s attention while they led a witch hunt against the three most principled members of the commission. With the local press fixated on my story, few people even noticed that the city government had effectively turned its back on the idea of holding the local police accountable for their actions.
On June 15, City Council Chair Ben Stuckart and Mayor David Condon sent me a letter that said I’d been followed by a private investigator who’d discovered that I had integrity issues, and asked for my resignation. Knowing that Kevin, Adrian, and I had done nothing but our best, I refused to fall on my sword. The city council responded by holding a special session on June 18 during which they unanimously voted to remove me. When the media spread the news of my dismissal, people assumed I’d been forced out because of the controversy surrounding me. What they failed to notice was that I was just one of three OPOC members who were asked to step down, and for an entirely different reason. By removing three of the five commissioners, the city council succeeded in shutting down the work of the OPOC indefinitely.
I also received a letter from the City of Spokane telling me I was being sued for checking BLACK on the application I filled out to get the OPOC position, but that was the last I ever heard about the lawsuit. Maybe the city’s legal team figured out that, thanks to scientific evidence that says modern humans evolved from Africa, all of us could feasibly check BLACK on forms such as theirs, which defined the category as “having origins in the continent of Africa.” More likely, they were just happy to get rid of me and, once public opinion turned against me, considered their work done.
My theory that the investigation into Rebekah’s complaints was a smokescreen gained credibility when I later found out that it succeeded in distracting attention from the meltdown taking place in the upper echelons of Spokane’s government. In April, police spokeswoman Monique Cotton had informed Mayor Condon and City Administrator Theresa Sanders that Chief Straub had “grabbed her ass” and “tried to kiss her.” Despite Cotton’s claims that Straub had sexually harassed her, she refused to file a formal complaint. Instead, after a private meeting with the mayor during which she agreed to keep the scandal quiet, she walked away with a new job in the Parks and Recreation Department, a $10,000 raise, and an agreement that the $13,000 in legal fees she owed would be paid.
Three months after I was removed from the OPOC, Straub “voluntarily resigned,” though his resignation had all the hallmarks of a termination. Because Straub resigned and wasn’t fired, it prevented the investigation into his behavior from going public until after Mayor Condon’s reelection in November 2015. Doubling down on his stupidity, Condon appointed Rick Dobrow to be Straub’s successor, even though Dobrow lacked a bachelor’s degree, had less than three years of experience in the upper ranks of the police department, and was on the verge of retirement. Dobrow’s tenure only lasted three months, but it was enough for him to retire with a pension adjusted for a police chief’s pay. Dobrow’s successor, former U.S. Attorney for Eastern Washington Jim McDevitt, seemed just as ill-suited for a position that required good judgment and tact. Prior to taking the job, McDevitt had written an opinion piece in The Spokesman-Review that said, in effect, that Black people wouldn’t get shot by police if they would just cooperate and that their welfare moms were to blame for not raising them right.
Even though I hadn’t earned a cent while serving as the OPOC chair, I’d cherished the job. Along with my unpaid NAACP presidency, it had made my mission to hold the local police accountable for their actions much more effective. Without those positions, I only had my teaching job at EWU to sustain me, but that was on life support as well. Soon after resigning from the OPOC, I discovered that I could no longer access my EWU email account. Then Dr. Finnie asked to meet with me. When I arrived, he informed me that my contract wouldn’t be renewed and told me to clear out my office. After working for the university for more than eight years, I was given ten minutes to grab all my stuff before being shown the door.
Losing my teaching position was the final blow to my professional career. On June 10, I’d had four jobs and, after winning a series of honors earlier in the year, including a woman in nonprofit leadership award from Catalyst magazine and the Bill First Human Rights Award from the Spokane County Democrats, I was starting to feel appreciated for all my hard work. But within a week, I’d lost every single one of my jobs. One minute I was working 24/7 in support of racial justice, and the next I only had one job left: explaining and justifying my very existence on the planet.
After losing my income and my reputation, I was reeling. Izaiah, Franklin, and Esther were what kept me going. If nothing else, I knew that I needed to keep breathing, eating, sleeping, and surviving for them. I’ll admit it wasn’t easy. I was looking at the very real possibility of never being able to find employment, love, friendship, or fulfillment ever again. When I realized that living as who I really am might never again be an option for me, my will to survive waned. Overwhelming social pressure is enough to drive people to the edge, and that’s where I was—the edge. I considered killing myself and might have actually done it had it not been for my family.
I wasn’t a white woman, but no one saw me as a Black woman either, so how was I supposed to proceed? If the whole world rejects you, what’s the point in sticking around? Life is already too difficult and too painful to take on the added burden of being without a community, quarantined in solitary confinement psychologically, intuitively, and emotionally.
Was there a place for me in this world?
Chapter Twenty-Seven
New York
WITHIN JUST A FEW HOURS of the KXLY interview appearing on the internet and the story about me going viral, the media set up camp on my street. Cameramen hid behind trees and shrubs, hoping to get a shot of me. Whenever I dared to leave the house, reporters ran up to me, asking me questions and begging for a comment. Producers and entertainment bookers tried to convince me why I should agree to be interviewed on their shows. This one reporter from People magazine would run up to my car, get right in my personal space, and refuse to take no for an answer. Compared to the reporters from Fox and ABC, she was an angel. The guy from ABC would actually bang on my front door and yell, “We know you’re in there!” I had no interest in talking to any of them, but that only seemed to make them more determin
ed to convince me.
Larry and Ruthanne didn’t share my apprehension about speaking to the press, agreeing to be interviewed by Fox, NBC, ABC, and CNN. On Monday, June 15, they appeared on Good Morning America, and when host George Stephanopoulos asked them about Esther’s case against Josh, Ruthanne responded, “Of all of Rachel’s false and malicious fabrications, this is definitely the worst. Rachel is desperately trying to destroy her biological family.” Stephanopoulos called that “a very serious charge.” It was a very telling one as well. Think about it. What had I done to destroy that family? Josh was the one who had assaulted Esther, and Esther was the one who’d filed the charges against him. All I’d ever done was support her and be myself. Larry and Ruthanne were the ones who’d gone on the offensive. When the press contacted them, they could have declined to be interviewed. Instead, they shared a truncated copy of my birth certificate that made no mention of Jesus Christ being the attendant to my birth, as well as photos of me from when I was a little girl, which, strangely, appeared to have been altered to take on a bluish-white skin tone. In short, they tried to ruin my credibility by dragging my name through the mud. Why else would they volunteer to air their family’s dirty laundry on national television?
Not content to carry out their smear campaign all by themselves, they enlisted Ezra and Zach to join them. My brothers made all sorts of calculated yet no less hurtful allegations. On MSNBC, Ezra said that I was “pretending to be Black” and that the pictures I drew of myself as a child—long before he was born—were “not real.” On ABC News, he falsely claimed I’d once taken him aside, told him I was going to change my identity, and asked him not to “blow [my] cover.” He even told the Washington Post that I “made [Izaiah] really racist toward white people” by raising him in a pro-Black environment. But he saved his most offensive and insulting comments for the interview he did with BuzzFeed when he said my transition from white girl to Black woman was “a slap in the face to African Americans.” Although he had never witnessed my morning routine in front of the bathroom mirror, he went on to allege, “She puts dark makeup on her face and says she Black. It’s basically blackface.”
Out of everything he said, this comment brought me the most sorrow because I was well aware of just how offensive blackface was and was saddened that someone, especially someone I’d helped raise from a baby, could confuse how I was living with that sort of racism. Knowing that he hadn’t been raised in a very healthy environment, I wanted to cut him some slack, but his comment made it sound as if I were wearing a costume and making fun of Black women instead of simply being myself. Wearing blackface is the opposite of being pro-Black, of celebrating “Black is Beautiful,” of working for racial justice, and of trying to undo white supremacy—all the things to which I’d dedicated my life. To mock these things would have been to mock myself. But it made for a provocative headline, so the truth was lost in the uproar.
As hurt as I was, it was clear to me that Ezra had been brainwashed by Larry and Ruthanne and coached into making the blackface comment. He and Zach were still young and impressionable and almost completely dependent on Larry and Ruthanne, financially and psychologically. Of all my younger siblings, Ezra had always been their favorite, so it made sense when he sided with them, but I was confused about Zach’s motivations. After all, he’d been treated even worse by his adopted parents than Izaiah had. Then I remembered that in the spring, just a few months before the story about me went viral, he’d asked me to cosign a loan with him so he could buy a truck. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the necessary income or credit to help him out. He found another way. Not long after making his one appearance on national television to discredit me, he started driving a new truck. If I had to guess, I’d say that Larry and Ruthanne or perhaps Larry’s mother Peggy had bought it for him. Regardless of what he and Ezra said about me on TV, I still loved them and held out hope that someday they would find their true selves, become more empowered and independent, and reconcile with me.
The sullying of my reputation, which Larry and Ruthanne started and the media quickly picked up on, wasn’t limited to tearing my life apart; it also burrowed its way into the lives of everyone close to me. Fortunately, Izaiah was able to get out of town and avoid the spotlight that was shining on me. On Saturday, June 13, he left for a summer internship at the American Association for Access Equity and Diversity in Washington, DC. When he arrived, his supervisor took him aside to assure him that they would do their best to shield him from the media and any negativity while he was there. But no one could stop what was being said about him in the press. Few of the reporters were able to get the story straight. They kept referring to Izaiah as my brother and Franklin as my oldest son.
Other commentators mistook Franklin for Izaiah and called Franklin my adopted child. They seemed to put more trust in the words of Larry and Ruthanne, the two people who’d caused Izaiah so much pain in the past, than the official paperwork that showed I had full custody of him. Izaiah didn’t see the situation getting better with time. He had the same last name I did and worried about what sort of reaction he was going to get when he returned to school in the fall. “You need to say something,” he told me.
Hoping to protect my kids by pulling attention away from them and squarely onto me, I grew more open to the idea of speaking to the media once I’d resigned from my NAACP position and could freely do so. The only producer of color I saw, Devna Shukla from CNN, got my attention first. I let her inside my house, and we discussed whether I wanted to go on Anderson Cooper’s show. I also discussed my options with an entertainment booker from NBC named Giselle. I told her that I wanted to talk to a Black woman about my experience and that I really respected Melissa Harris-Perry.
Unlike all the other journalists who jumped to the simplest and most popular conclusion and called me a liar, Harris-Perry seemed to understand and appreciate the complexity of my identity. “Is it possible that she might actually be Black?” she asked in a discussion about me with the author Allyson Hobbs on her June 13 show. “The best way I know how to describe this—and I want to be very careful here because I don’t want to say it’s equivalent to the transgender experience but there’s a useful language in trans and cis, which is just to say that some of us are born cisgender and some of us are born transgendered—but I’m wondering can it be that we can be cisBlack and transBlack, that there’s actually a different category of Blackness that is about the achievement of Blackness despite one’s parentage?”
Wanting to engage in exactly this sort of in-depth discussion about the fluidity of race, I asked Giselle if she could get me on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show on MSNBC and was a little shocked when she said, “Who is Melissa Harris-Perry?”
“Uh, just my favorite journalist and academic on television.”
Giselle left to speak with her boss, and when she returned the negotiations began in earnest. If I agreed to come to New York City and talk for ten minutes with Matt Lauer on the Today Show, thirty minutes with Savannah Guthrie on NBC Nightly News, and sixty minutes with Amber Payne on MSNBC-BLK, I would get to speak with Melissa Harris-Perry for forty-five minutes on her show. I said I would do it on one condition. Perpetually strapped for cash and overloaded with work, I’d never taken my kids on a true vacation. Sure, we’d done plenty of fun stuff locally like hiking in the mountains, spending the day at Silverwood Theme Park, and going out on friends’ boats in the summer, but all three of us had never gotten on a plane together and flown across the country. I’d been to New York several times to attend academic conferences, but Izaiah and Franklin had never been, so I asked Giselle if NBC would pay for Franklin to fly with me and Izaiah to fly up from DC. Giselle said they’d be happy to do that if I agreed to get on the next plane to New York. The next plane! This was problematic. My good friend Siobhan, who I’d met at church while living in West Jackson, Mississippi, had called me earlier in the day and told me that after hearing about my situation she’d packed a suitcase, rented a car, and started driving
with her sixteen-year-old son Malique from Las Vegas to Spokane to help me through this ordeal. I explained to Giselle that I couldn’t leave Siobhan hanging. If I was to leave that day, they’d need to fly her to New York as well. Giselle agreed to it all.
While flying from Spokane to New York, we had a layover in Chicago, and Franklin, Giselle, and I ducked into a spa. We didn’t want massages. We just wanted to avoid being ogled by people who’d seen me in the news. We asked the staff if we could sit in the waiting area for just a moment. The Black man who was working there asked us why.
“I’ve been in the news a lot lately,” I told him.
“For what?”
“Am I Black or white?” I asked him.
He looked me over. “Black.”
“That’s why I’ve been in the news. Everyone’s talking about what ethnicity I am.”
After getting accosted by paparazzi at the airport in New York, we got into a town car that took us to the Park Hyatt, which, Giselle informed us, was one of the few hotels in New York with a private entrance just for celebrities. “It’s where Obama and Jay Z stay,” she added.
The hotel was indeed really nice, and Franklin was bouncing off the walls with excitement, pointing out the stocked fridge, the super-comfy bed, and the TV built into the bathroom mirror. The only things he was unhappy about were having to sleep on a cot and not being twenty-one, which would have allowed him to get his own room just like Izaiah, who’d checked in several hours before us. Both of them felt like they were on vacation, and I indulged their fantasy by encouraging them to make a list of all the places they wanted to see and things they wanted to do in Manhattan. Standing on top of the Empire State Building, going to Central Park, getting a slice of pizza, buying an I♥NY T-shirt, and seeing a mime all made the list.
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