Race fakers of America unmasked: From infamous Rachel Dolezal to white Muslim activist claiming to be of South Asian, Arab and Latin descent – these are the most outrageous racial imposters

• Raquel Saraswati was born Rachel Seidel and is of European descent – but claimed to be a person of color
• She is the latest high-profile example of a person who’s deceived people by claiming to be a different race
• Others include Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who claimed she was black and was a chapter president of the NAACP

The ‘outing’ of a white woman and inclusion officer who claimed to be of Latin, South Asian and Arab descent marks the latest example of a ‘race faker’ being exposed. 

Raquel Saraswati was born Rachel Seidel and is of European descent – but claimed to be a person of color and used her story to secure the role of chief inclusion officer at a Philadelphia-based Quaker group.

Her lies follow a string of high-profile cases where white people have claimed to belong to other races and used makeup and cosmetic procedures to deceive people.

Raquel Saraswati

Raquel Evita Saraswati, 39, was ‘outed’ as white last week after claiming for years that she was of Latin, South Asian and Arab descent.

Saraswati, the chief inclusion officer at the American Friends Service Committee, was born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel to white parents with European heritage, according to an investigation into her background.

Raquel Saraswati claimed to be of Arab, Latina and South Asian descent. Her mother says she is in fact of white European origin, saying: ‘She’s chosen to live a lie’

She’s accused of ‘cultural vulturism’ and ‘the shades of bronzer she applies to her face have become darker over time’. Insiders at the AFSC have even suggested she may be ‘working on behalf of groups seeking to undermine their organization’.

Her mother Carol Perone, who confirmed her daughter was not a person of color, told The Intercept: ‘I call her Rachel. I don’t know why she’s doing what she’s doing.

Saraswati’s identity was first questioned in 2015, when a cultural commentator referred to her as ‘the ‘Raquel Dolezal’ in the Muslim community’

‘I’m as white as the driven snow and so is she,’ she said.

Perone said her daughter is of British, German, and Italian descent — not Latin, South Asian, or Arab. She said her daughter converted to Islam in high school, which likely informed her decision to present herself as another ethnicity.

Saraswati was born in Paterson, New Jersey and spend large amounts of time in Windham, where she attended school before being sent to boarding school in Troy, New York.

She studied at Simmons University in Boston, settling in Massachusetts and marrying her girlfriend, Anh Dao Kolbe in 2005. In 2004, the couple was mentioned in a Boston Globe feature, in which Ms Saraswati went by the name Seidel and said she was of Arab and Latin descent.

‘Raquel Evita Seidel, 20, of Brookline, said she and her girlfriend, Anh Dao Kolbe, have been together nine months,’ the author wrote. ‘While they are confident they want to marry, they also want to take the time to plan something that respects Seidel’s Arab and Latin traditions and 33-year-old Kolbe’s Vietnamese traditions.’

Saraswati appears to have begun claiming Indian ancestry around 2005. She is pictured celebrating the election of Kamala Harris, the first Indian American vice president 

The couple are now separated.

Saraswati’s identity was first questioned by media commentator Sana Saeed, who tweeted in 2015: ‘Can we talk about ‘Raquel Dolezal’ in the Muslim community. Y’all know who I mean.’

Rachel Dolezal

Rachel Dolezal, 45, is the most high-profile ‘race faker’ after she spent ten years posing as a black woman before she was outed in 2015.

Dolezal, a white woman whose family is primary of European descent, was a chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Spokane, Washington, and also a teacher of Africana studies at East Washington University.

Rachel Dolezal, who is white, falsely claimed she is black and sparked national outrage in 2015

The serial liar was dismissed from both organizations after it emerged she was white and spun an astonishing web of deceit to support her claims to be both black and of Native American descent.

Dolezal, who now runs an OnlyFans account that charges $10-a-month for racy pictures of her feet, defended herself as recently as 2021 by claiming her critics are ‘white supremacy folks’. She’s also made bizarre statements about how posing as a black woman meant she had to ‘cancel my white privilege’ and ‘cancel my hair’.

Childhood photographs of Dolezal, who was born in Montana, show a pale-skinned girl with freckles and straight, blond hair. By 2005, she had changed her hair, including by darkening it and wearing breads, and also darkened her skin with makeup.

In interviews after she was outed, Dolezal claimed her tactics were not a ‘mockery blackface performance’. ‘This is on a very real, connected level. I have actually had to go there with the experience,’ she said.

Her other claims included being a victim of racist abuse, having a noose left outside her home and a swastika painted at her office. Dolezal also said she’d received hate mail, but a police investigation found no evidence.

Rachel Dolezal, who became president of the Spokane NAACP chapter after lying about her race, pictured in 2015, the year her background as a white woman from Montana unraveled

Dolezal also claimed a black man she’d been photographed with after they met at an NAACP meeting was her father. Her parents outed her and Dolezal’s mother said in an interview: ‘Rachel is a master artist and so she is able to disguise herself.’

She appeared in a 2021 documentary about black beauty and attempted to defend her lies. ‘I’ve been called an insult to white women and an insult to black women. 

‘White women are angry because I did what they never would do and went further, like I put 110. ‘I didn’t just be that white ally and do a little bit, I canceled my white privilege. I canceled my hair.’

Kay LeClaire

Kay LeClaire is a white college student who claimed to be an Indigenous ‘two-spirit’ and deceived members of the Native American community.

LeClaire, who used the pronouns they and them, identified on Facebook as a ‘white woman’ as recently as July 2017 in a post about a planned wedding to Adam Pagenkopf.

Kay LeClaire is a white woman who claimed to be a Native American ‘two-spirit’ in 2019

But by 2019, LeClaire publicly identified as a Native American ‘two-spirit,’ which is a term many Indigenous people use to describe a non-binary gender identity.

LeClaire even went on to co-found a queer Indigenous artists’ collective in Wisconsin, and started buying Native American art from Etsy which they would pass off as their own and sell to unsuspecting buyers.

Some in the Native community have now said they had their suspicions about LeClaire, who went from a light-haired brunette to a tan woman with dark hair over the course of just a few years.

LeClaire was ultimately forced to step down from their community positions last month after it came to light that they were actually a ‘pretendian’ — a term Natives use for people who pretend to have Indigenous lineage.

LeClaire (right) graduated from Hamilton High School in Sussex, Wisconsin, in 2012

LeClaire co-founded the Griige Collective, a group of nonbinary Native artisans in Teejop who would provide customers with traditional Native tattoos, in 2019

AdvancedSmite, a hobbyist genealogist, laid out how LeClaire has claimed to have Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cuban and Jewish heritage.

But using online records and resources, AdvancedSmite discovered LeClaire’s true lineage is German, Swedish and French Canadian.

LeClaire later apologized and said: ‘Moving forward, my efforts will be towards reducing harm by following the directions provided by Native community members and community-specified proxies.’

Jessica Krug

Jessica Krug is a former George Washington University professor who lied about being black.

Krug, who is in her 40s, was born in a Jewish family and grew up in Kansas. Krug taught classes on African American history at George Washington University from 2012 until she resigned over the race faking scandal.

Her biography page on the university website said she specialized in subjects including Latin America, Africa, imperialism and colonialism.

Krug went to the exclusive Barstow school in Kansas City. She is pictured in her yearbook

She confessed to her lies in a blog post entitled ‘The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies’.

‘For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,’ she wrote.

‘To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.’

In a video posted online in June 2020 under her activist pseudonym, Jessica La Bombalera, Krug denounced ‘white New Yorkers’ and added: ‘Much power to all my siblings who were standing up, my black and brown siblings who were standing.’

Her family later said Krug was ‘white as snow white’. Her sister in law said: ‘It hurts because she slapped everyone in the face, not only her family, she slapped every Black woman in the face.’

Krug had written several books and essays on black culture.

Krug (pictured): ‘For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies’

She had taken financial support from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In 2009 she is understood to have been awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship.

Her book Fugitive Modernities includes the acknowledgement: ‘My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist…Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.’

DailyMail.com exclusively revealed how Krug went to the exclusive Barstow school in Kansas City where she was described as ‘very political’ and is said to have identified as a white, Jewish girl.

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