Rachel Dolezal's Parents: We Didn't Plan to Expose Her

Rachel Dolezal's biological parents say they didn't set out to expose their daughter as a white woman. That was merely the consequence of "some investigative reporting," according to her father. Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal, the white couple listed on Dolezal's Montana birth certificate, say they were approached by reporters with the Coeur d'Alene Press who "somehow ... got wind" they were the parents of Dolezal, head of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Wash., Lawrence Dolezal tells Today.com. "We weren't going to lie." Ruthanne says her daughter may have used the claim that she was mixed race to enhance her reputation as a black activist and educator. "She may have felt she had some advantage in her activism by being portrayed as a black woman."

Savannah Guthrie asks about some of the "pretty dramatic" claims Dolezal has made: that she was born in a teepee and used a bow and arrow to get her food, for instance. "Those are all false claims," says Ruthanne Dolezal. "I think Rachel has tried to damage her biological family and those kind of claims, as false as they were, seem to serve her purposes in her mind." Dolezal, who told students at Eastern Washington University that her father was black, had apparently arranged for a black man to act as her father, her adopted brother Ezra Dolezal tells CNN. "She puts dark make-up on her face and says she black," he adds, per Buzzfeed. "It's basically blackface." (More Rachel Dolezal stories.)