When Rachel Dolezal was outed as a white woman who identifies as black in June 2015, she inadvertently started an important conversation about race. With the launch of her memoir, In Full Color, Piya tries to understand the story that sparked so much hurt and outrage from the eye of the storm — that is to say, from the perspective of Rachel Dolezal herself. Hint: she hasn’t backed down. 1:06 Rachel Dolezal has been called a "race faker" and much worse. If you were near a TV, newspaper or anywhere online in June 2015, you likely bore witness as Dolezal was publicly outed as being born and raised white, even though, as she tells it, she came to identify and live as a black woman.

Dolezal with sons Izaiah, and Franklin after Izaiah’s high school graduation in 2013. (Courtesy of Rachel Dolezal) Later, she also came to occupy a leadership position in the NAACP — she was the president of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the organization — and often represented "the black community" in media interviews and as a front-of-the-protest Black Lives Matter activist. These choices caused both hurt and outrage, along with much speculation about her motives.

To many, Dolezal's actions could reasonably be seen as the ultimate in white privilege, a woman who simply assumed an identity she wanted, with no regard for the effect it would have on others. Perhaps not surprisingly, that's not how Dolezal sees it.

Dolezal and Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., at the University of Idaho, in Moscow, Idaho, at a speaking event in 2011. (Courtesy of Rachel Dolezal) "I am unapologetically on the black side," she tells Piya Chattopadhyay in this Canadian exclusive interview, "I can't go back. Once you discover yourself, going back would be suicide. You can't just flop in and out of who you are."

While Dolezal remembers fantasizing about being black when she was a child, she says her journey to fully embrace that identity was a long one — a process of evolution that began in earnest when she attended college.

"People were always telling me, 'No, you're really black … I've never met a white person like you. You're more black than you are white.' All those things I heard over and over.

"And then, people started to just identify me as mixed or biracial or even albino …'redbone' … And I just let it happen because I … got tired of explaining and having no more understanding than I had at the beginning of the conversation. In fact, it was just more confusing to people … 'Are you sure your mom didn't have an affair?'

"So when I was identifying as white, people were basically telling me I'm black. Now that I lived for years as a black woman and was seen as that ... now people are trying to tell me I'm white and not black ... From where I sit, I have to be me regardless of what other people say."

To be me, and to live, and to stay on the planet means I have to be myself - Rachel Dolezal

Dolezal with her sister Esther, left, in the summer of 2013. (Courtesy of Rachel Dolezal) Dolezal felt she never got to fully explain herself during the media frenzy in June 2015. Now, she is trying to add her own voice to the chorus that has weighed in on whether or not she's a fraud, a liar and worse — someone who took up space and betrayed the trust of the very community she claims to identify with.

She has a memoir out today — titled In Full Color — that promises to launch a whole new blast of coverage, spilling more details about a story that seems to have already been exhaustively covered.

But until now, several aspects of Dolezal's story have been frustratingly hard to understand: How does this contentious figure make sense of her own life, her own story? From her undeniably unique vantage point, what can we learn about the way we conceive of race today?

Can something good come out of the strange — and strangely fascinating — story of Rachel Dolezal?

Piya went on her own journey to find out.

PIYA: "I have to tell you, you confound me greatly. Because I have these two strong reactions when I listen and am understanding you. On the one hand… I'm fascinated because you're making me think about things that I've never thought about. But my other reaction to you, Rachel, is — what a convenient way to just justify… a pretty awful act of betrayal to the black community. So I'm sort of stuck".

RACHEL: "Well, you're going to think what you think regardless of what I say, obviously. You have your own personal story and I'm sure that your ideas of race, whether as a construct or as a lived reality, influence your lens. I think, to some extent, people in America just want to have a conversation about this topic and a lot of what's said doesn't really have a lot to do with me. It has more to do with the individual saying it and the cultural context for the conversation. But I think it's an important question. Is it how we look? Is it how we feel? ... If two people look the same way and one person feels more strongly connected to one culture or the other, or one philosophy or the other, is that important? Or should we just focus on how other people are identifying us? With identity, there's what we say, and we have to go to sleep at night and be able to live with that. And then there's what other people see, and how they treat us."

One thing we know for sure is that Dolezal is not backing down. "To be me, and to live, and to stay on the planet means I have to be myself," she says, "This is the oxygen that I breathe and this is what I love and this is what nurtures my soul. I can't give it up just because everybody wants me to … I've kind of become OK with that level of misunderstanding just being something that will last until it's kind of worn out."

Listen to the full conversation to hear Dolezal discuss her childhood, how she came to identify as black, her experience of being outed as white, and address the questions many have about who she is and what she believes she represents.

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