Recently, there has been a flurry of discussion regarding the way Rachel Dolezal was raised — homeschooled, in an religiously abusive environment. It’s been speculated that this complicates the situation, and additional sympathy seems to have been given, as a result, to Rachel Dolezal. This discussion is based on reactions to two original articles in Homeschoolers Anonymous. One is titled “The Media is Doing Exactly What Rachel Dolezal’s Abusive Homeschooling Parents Want,” and the other is entitled, “Here’s What Joshua Dolezal Said about His and Rachel’s Abusive Upbringing.” If you follow the links to these articles, you’ll find they are not there. Instead, there’s a link to this page, which states:
On June 16 and 17, we published two articles highlighting the alleged history of abuse and control within Rachel Dolezal’s family. Since Rachel was a homeschool alumna raised in a conservative Christian home similar to many individuals in HA’s regular audience, we intended these articles to draw attention to elements of the Dolezal story that the mainstream media had missed — in particular, that Rachel’s parents, Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal, should not be paraded around as innocent whistleblowers.
When we published these articles, we did not see that doing so acted as apologies and/or excuses for Rachel’s behavior. Our decision to publish them has thus resulted in excusing and diminishing her behavior as well as detracting from the fact that Rachel has deeply hurt many members of the black community. We apologize for this and we are grateful to the people who have contacted us to point out this blind spot.
As HA Community Coordinator, I take full responsibility for these failures. I am sorry for the pain I have caused to those affected by Rachel’s actions.
As we were in the wrong, we are retracting the articles. However, we do not want to erase or hide our mistake, so we have saved the articles and their comments as PDFs below:
And underneath this message are the promised PDFs.
I want to applaud Homeschoolers Anonymous for choosing not to ignore the fact that Rachel’s childhood does not in any way excuse or diminish the harm she has done to the black community. Sympathy has its place, but the fact is that Rachel Dolezal’s arrogant assumption that she is an authority on blackness is not something to be excused, but repudiated.
Thanks for reading.
[Image Courtesy of Anna Swoboda under Creative Commons License]