Rachel Dolezal, part deux. Or is it trois?

We all remember Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP leader who was outed a few years ago (2015) as white. Kinda blew her credibility?

And then there was Dolezal the Second, the black female activist George Washington University professor Jessica Krug.  She was suspected of being non-black, and finally outed herself as being a white Jewess back in 2020.

A white Jewish professor from Kansas City has seemingly admitted to posing as a Black woman, in a striking confession that her whole adult life and career have been built on “lies.”

In the Medium post, the author says her “Black” backstory evolved over time. She initially pretended to be of North African descent, then claimed her roots were in the U.S., before eventually placing her faux roots in the Caribbean via the Bronx.

Global News

Dolezal and Krug merely called themselves black. Now we have a trifecta, a gay Muslim multi-ethnic activist name of Raquel Evita Saraswati. This particolored poser converted to Islam in high school, and has been darkening her complexion and her image ever since. You know you have a problem when your own MOTHER calls you out:

The Muslim activist, who has access to files of the progressive Quaker group’s workers and volunteers, has claimed for years to be of Latin, South Asian and Arab descent.

But her mother, Carol Perone, said Saraswati is actually of British, German and Italian descent.

“I call her Rachel. I don’t know why she’s doing what she’s doing,” Perone told the Intercept. “I’m as white as the driven snow and so is she.”

She added: “I’m German and British, and her father was Calabrese Italian. She’s chosen to live a lie, and I find that very, very sad.”

Raquel Evita Saraswati,  39, who was born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel, is the chief equity, inclusion and culture officer of the American Friends Service Committee, which fights “violence, inequality and oppression,” the Intercept reported.

How disappointing to find that all those inclusion boxes revert to being unchecked:

Oskar Pierre Castro, a human resources official who helped AFSC hire Saraswati, was told she was a “queer, Muslim, multiethnic woman,” according to the news outlet.

“In my mind it was, ‘Great, a person of color, a queer person of color, who happens to be a Muslim, it’s a woman,’ all these things, and someone who seemed to get it,” Castrol told the Intercept.

NY Post

No word whether she gets to keep her job. Seems back around 9/11 Saraswati appeared on several rightish talk shows as a “moderate Muslim”. Given her propensity for stretching and bending the truth (okay, crumpling and shredding it) many of the people who confided in her worry that she could be a conservative plant. I guess, as they say, paranoia does indeed strike deep. For you old farts:

Category: Diversity, Reality Check