Following Rachel Dolezal’s decision to resign from her position as the president of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the organization’s president said on Monday that the NAACP will now be able to focus on its advocacy.
“The NAACP is not concerned with the racial identity of our leadership but the institutional integrity of our advocacy. Our focus must be on issues not individuals. Ms. Rachel Dolezal has decided to resign to ensure that the Spokane branch remains focused on fighting for civil and human rights,” NAACP President Cornell Brooks said in a statement. “This resignation today comes amidst the real work of the NAACP and the real challenges to our democracy.”
Dolezal resigned from her position with the NAACP on Monday after multiple news outlets reported that she had been pretending to be black. She had said numerous times that she was of African-American descent, but her parents, who describe themselves as white, say that Dolezal is also white.
She wrote in a Monday statement that she stepped down because “the dialogue has unexpectedly shifted internationally to my personal identity in the context of defining race and ethnicity.”
