Rachel Dolezal: I've identified as black since I was 5 years old

Rachel Dolezal, the former president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, said Tuesday that the timing of the controversy surrounding her racial identity took her by surprise.

“The timing of it was a shock. I mean, wow. The timing was completely unexpected,” Dolezal said in a Tuesday interview on NBC’s “Today” with Matt Lauer, adding that, “I did feel that at some point I would need to address the complexity of my identity,” but not at this moment.


Save for “probably a couple interviews” that she says she would have done a “little differently,” Dolezal however said she would not change any of her decisions.

Dolezal clarified to Lauer that she identifies as black, not African-American, and that she began feeling that way when she was “about five years old.”

“I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon,” Dolezal told Lauer. Shown a picture of her younger self, Dolezal acknowledged that at the time, she would have been visibly identified by people who see her as white.

But the former NAACP chapter president said that she never corrected news reports that identified her as “black” or “biracial” because, she said, “it’s more complex than being true or false in that particular instance.”

“I certainly don’t stay out of the sun, you know,” Dolezal said when asked about whether she has done something to darken her complexion. “I also don’t, as some of the critics have said, put on blackface as part of a performance,” she added. “This is not some freak ‘Birth of a Nation’ mockery blackface performance.”

Dolezal resigned from her position with the NAACP Monday after her parents said last week that their daughter was misrepresenting herself as African-American.

“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,” NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks said in a statement released Monday after Dolezal’s resignation. “Ms. Rachel Dolezal has decided to resign to ensure that the Spokane branch remains focused on fighting for civil and human rights. This resignation today comes amidst the real work of the NAACP and the real challenges to our democracy.”

Dolezal, who graduated from Howard University, sued the historically black university in 2002, alleging that the school denied her a scholarship, a teaching assistant job and further employment because she was white.

In her lawsuit, first reported by The Smoking Gun on Monday, Dolezal claimed an academic environment that was “permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult.” The complaint was dismissed in February 2004, and the D.C. Court of Appeals later affirmed that decision.

“The reasons for my full tuition scholarship being removed and my teaching position … were that other people needed other opportunities. I thought that that was an injustice,” Dolezal explained.