Rachel Dolezal: ‘I didn’t mislead anybody; I didn’t deceive anybody'

Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP leader who resigned last month after being accused of lying about her race, doesn’t think she deceived anyone by representing herself as black.

“I just feel like I didn’t mislead anybody; I didn’t deceive anybody,” Dolezal told Vanity Fair. “If people feel misled or deceived, then sorry that they feel that way, but I believe that’s more due to their definition and construct of race in their own minds than it is to my integrity or honesty, because I wouldn’t say I’m African-American, but I would say I’m black, and there’s a difference in those terms.”

In June, Dolezal’s biological parents, who are white, disclosed that their daughter is white but had been posing as a black woman, sparking an ethics investigation at the NAACP and touching off a national debate over racial identity.

Dolezal resigned as president of the organization’s Spokane, Wash., chapter, but refused to apologize.

“I identify as black,” Dolezal said in an interview with NBC’s “Today” following her resignation.

The 37-year-old civil rights activist said she has been doing so since the age of 5.

“I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon,” Dolezal said.

But Dolezal dismissed the notion that representing herself as African-American amounts to blackface.

“I certainly don’t stay out of the sun,” she said, “but I don’t put on blackface as a performance.”

“It’s not a costume,” Dolezal told the magazine. “I don’t know spiritually and metaphysically how this goes, but I do know that from my earliest memories I have awareness and connection with the black experience, and that’s never left me. It’s not something that I can put on and take off anymore. Like I said, I’ve had my years of confusion and wondering who I really [was] and why and how do I live my life and make sense of it all, but I’m not confused about that any longer. I think the world might be — but I’m not.”

Dolezal — who has four adopted black stepsiblings, was married to a black man and has two black children — attended the historically black Howard University, graduating in 2002.

In a separate interview with MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Dolezal was asked, “Are you black?”

“Yes,” Dolezal replied.

Dolezal said being the mother of two black sons has shown her “what it means to experience and live black... blackness.”

“From a very young age,” Dolezal explained, “I felt a very, I don’t know, spiritual, visceral, just very instinctual connection with ‘black is beautiful’ and, you know, just the black experience and wanting to celebrate that — and I didn’t know how to articulate that as a young child.”

But the Smoking Gun reports that in 2002, the year she graduated, Dolezal filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against Howard University claiming that she was denied teaching posts and a scholarship because she was white. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2004.

On “Today,” Dolezal said she doesn’t understand why her parents “are in a rush to whitewash some of the work that I have done and who I am and how I have identified.”

“I definitely am not white,” she said. “Nothing about being white describes who I am.”

“It’s hard to collapse it all into just a single statement about what is,” Dolezal added in the Vanity Fair interview. “You can’t just say in one sentence what is blackness or what is black culture or what makes you who you are.”