Rachel Dolezal continued to insist on her black identity by claiming that race is a social construct after she likened herself to Caitlyn Jenner.

After Dolezal made headlines for being unmasked as a white woman in 2015, the former NAACP figure has recently emerged with more controversial claims about race.

The 'unapologetically black' 39-year-old claimed she believes race is a social construct and that she stands by her 'trans-black' identity, in an interview on Saturday.

She added: 'I haven't identified as African-American. I've identified as black. And black is a culture, a philosophy, a political and social view.'

Rachel Dolezal continued to insist on her black identity by claiming that race is a social construct after she likened herself to Caitlyn Jenner in an interview on Saturday

The former NAACP leader posted this picture on social media two weeks ago of her posing with two copies of her memoir In Full Color, which is out now

The 39-year-old was unmasked as a white woman in 2015. She claims that ethnicity is not biological and compared being 'transracial' to being transgender

Dolezal, from Spokane, Washington, made the comments while appearing on CNN to promote her new book, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World.

She revealed that since she was a little girl she had 'an affinity for black is beautiful and black is inspirational'. The mother said even her aunt seemed to recognize her 'transracial' identity, as she had made her a black Raggedy Ann doll as a child.

Dolezal again addressed her comparisons with Caitlyn Jenner, who announced her transition the same year Dolezal was exposed.

She said: 'I want to be careful because certainly every category of our identity is, you know, with its own unique circumstances and challenges.

'In terms of stigmatized identities, some people will forever see me as my birth category and nothing further. And the same with Caitlyn.'

Last week, the mother was attacked on Twitter for making similar statements about race and claiming the 'idea of race is a lie', in an interview with the BBC.

She said ethnicity is not biological and compared being 'transracial' to being transgender in the interview. Afterwards the social media platform erupted with people accusing her of using 'white privilege' to make her arguments.

In another interview, which aired last week, Dolezal insisted of her 'transracial' identity, which sparked outrage from people on Twitter

Dolezal said in the interview: 'Gender is understood – we've progressed, we've evolved to understanding that gender is not binary.'

She added: 'It's not even biological. But what strikes me as so odd is that race isn't biological either.

'And actually race has been to some extent less biological than gender, if you really think about history and our bodies.

'There isn't, like, white blood and black blood.'

Critics online said that Dolezal was using cultural appropriation to become a black woman and that Dolezal wanted to 'steal things from other cultures to be trendy'.

One person said that people can't 'become black' because 'at any moment what "makes" blackness can be erased'.

Some argued that the idea of being 'transracial' was 'only available to white people'.

This was one of several times Dolezal has compared acting as a black woman to being transgender.

In 2015, she likened her situation to that of Caitlyn Jenner, who announced she was transitioning from male to female in April of that year.

Following her BBC interview, Dolezal, pictured above left with BBC presenter Emily Maitlis, was accused of cultural appropriation and wanting to 'steal things from other cultures to be trendy' by acting as a black woman

Dolezal told the Guardian that comparisons could be drawn with the 67-year-old former Olympian - arguing that people should not be defined by who or what they were at birth.

Dolezal said: 'Caitlyn Jenner has not been seen as a woman, and treated as a woman by other people, for her entire life. So what does that mean? What if somebody transitions as a teenager and their entire adult life we know them as a woman.

'I hope we can reach some kind of term for the plurality of people and allow everybody to be exactly who they are on the spectrum of all these things. Religion, gender, race.'

Dolezal also suggested people were 'operating on an autopilot that race is coded in your DNA'.

As she was: Dolezal was an ordinary white girl with blonde hair as a teenager

'What I believe about race is that race is not real. It's not a biological reality. It's a hierarchical system that was created to leverage power and privilege between different groups of people.'

Dolezal said she has been unable to find steady work in the nearly two years since her background became public in media reports, and she is uncertain about her future.

In her BBC interview, Dolezal explained how she's been ostracized since it was revealed that she was a white woman.

She said: 'I'm so stigmatized right now - not just at large, but especially in this town where I have to stay here in this region, to be a mother. It's a very hostile environment.

'Some people stopped me in the grocery store and say like: "Oh my goodness! Did you know that you look like that one white woman who said she was black but she wasn't?" and then laugh.

"You know, and it's just like: "Ahhh that's interesting" is what I say. And then they say: 'Oh, it's not a bad thing because she was quite pretty!"'

The disgraced civil rights activist is officially on the comeback trail and back in the spotlight, ahead of the release of the book on Tuesday.

The most unapologetic excerpts are two of the chapter titles chosen by the 40-year-old: 'Escaping to Africa (in My Head)' and 'Hustling to Make a Dollar'.

The former NAACP leader, who still says she 'identifies' as black despite being 'Caucasian biologically', uses these chapters to compare her childhood chores to slave labor.

Dolezal is estranged from her parents and they have never met her one-year-old son Langston, a friend tells DailyMail.com

Explosive snippets of a memoir by Rachel Dolezal - the former head of Spokane, Washington's NAACP chapter who claimed to be black before her parents 'outed' her as white - have been released

'It wouldn't have been too much of a stretch to call me an indentured servant,' she wrote.

Warming to her theme, she tries to claim that she developed a 'similar resourcefulness' that slaves were forced to develop because of the way her parents made her to do housework.

THE TIMELINE OF RACHEL DOLEZAL June 2009: Dolezal makes one of her first TV appearances, with KHQ network. September and November 2009: The then-director of the Human Rights Education Institute in Coeur d'Alene claims she found a noose hanging on her door, and that swastika was drawn on the build where she worked. April 2011: Dolezal is working with the NAACP in Washington state during the time that a march in downtown Spokane after a bomb was found on MLK Day. April 2014: She, 'applies for the Citizen Commission of Spokane Police Ombudsman, and under ethnic origins she checks 'White', 'black', 'two or more races' and 'American Indian',' KHQ reports. November 2014: Dolezal helps organize a rally in Ferguson, MO, after the death of Michael Brown. February 2015: A threatening message littered with racial abuse is sent to Dolezal at the Spokane NAACP office. 'It's deeply concerning, but I'm committed to living my life and not hiding in fear. So I will continue to fight for justice,' she said at the time. June 2015: Dolezal's parents finally speak out and break their silence, revealing their daughter is white, and has been misrepresenting her race for years. As for why they never spoke up before, they said, 'no one asked'. Advertisement

She claims this everyday rite of passage for modest children was similar to 'the institution of chattel slavery in America'.

Her claims about her parents are a lengthy attack on how they brought her up, starting with a claim that she was born in a teepee.

Throughout her childhood, she claims, she felt that she was black - even though she did not meet a single black person until she was ten.

She had blond hair and freckles while growing up near Troy, Montana. She says it was a 'painfully white world', which she eventually left behind.

When she was a teenager, her parents adopted four black children, and she felt 'closer to something that felt oddly familiar'.

But even that warrants an attack on her parents because she claims the adoption was solely to benefit from tax breaks.

Dolezal says it wasn't until she was able attend college that she was able to express herself as a black woman.

She attended Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi, for her bachelor's degree, then went on to get her Master of Fine Arts from the historically black college Howard University in Washington, DC.

Dolezal had married Kevin Moore in 2000, when he was a medical student at Howard University. They divorced in 2004, which is when she decided to become publicly black.

The ruse worked for years until 2015 when her parents, with whom she has long feuded, told local reporters their daughter was born white but was presenting herself as a black activist in the Spokane region, an area with few minorities.

The story became an international sensation, and Dolezal lost the various jobs by which she pieced together a modest living for her family.

Attacked by both blacks and whites, she was fired as head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP and kicked off a police ombudsman commission, and she lost her job teaching African studies at Eastern Washington University in nearby Cheney.

Dolezal's mother also showed reporters this photo in 2015 of her daughter's 2000 marriage in Mississippi (she is pictured at center and her parents are standing on either side). She is now divorced but has three children

She could not even get a job in a grocery store, she claims.

Despite failing to find a job, Dolezal says she has to stay in the area because of a custody agreement involving one of her sons.

But overall, she described her 'blackness' as a positive.

'Living as a Black woman made my life infinitely better. It also made it infinitely harder, thanks to other people's racist perceptions of me,' she wrote.

Rachel Dolezal's book (pictured) - In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World - was released on March 28

'The Blacker I became - not just in the clothes I wrote or the books I read but in terms of how I was being seen and treated - the more distant and isolated I felt from white people.

'[I stopped] feeling obligated to check WHITE on medical forms, and once I started claiming my identity and checking BLACK, any whiteness I possessed became invisible.'

But now Dolezal says she has been unable to find steady work in the nearly two years since she was outed as a white woman in local media reports, and she is uncertain about her future.

'I was presented as a con and a fraud and a liar,' Dolezal, said. 'I think some of the treatment was pretty cruel.'

'People didn't seem able to consider that maybe both were true,' she said. 'OK, I was born to white parents, but maybe I had an authentic black identity.'

She has sold some of her artwork, and also braids hair to earn money. But she said local colleges have refused to hire her, as have nonprofits, government agencies and even local grocery stores.

She was worried she might become homeless in March, but friends bought some of her artwork, which provided enough money to pay the rent for a few months.

Dolezal said it is hard for her to look toward the future when she is struggling so hard to survive the present.