Rachel Dolezal said on Tuesday that she cannot prove who her real parents are, even though Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal, who describe themselves as white, have shown news outlets a birth certificate indicating that they are Rachel’s parents.
“I haven’t had a DNA test. There’s been no biological proof that Larry and Ruthanne are my biological parents,” Rachel told Savannah Guthrie in an interview for NBC’s “Nightly News.”
Guthrie then mentioned the birth certificate provided by Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal.
“I’m not necessarily saying that I can prove they’re not. But I don’t know that I can actually prove they are. I mean, the birth certificate is issued a month and a half after I’m born. And certainly there were no medical witnesses to my birth,” Rachel responded.
She then told Guthrie that she is “definitely not white.”
“Nothing about being white describes who I am. So, what’s the word for it? The closest thing that I can come to is, if you’re black or white, I’m black. I’m more black than I am white,” Rachel said.
Guthrie later mentioned that some have compared Dolezal’s racial identity to transgender individuals and asked if the comparison made any sense.
Dolezal said she read a magazine piece on Caitlyn Jenner.
“I resonated with some of the themes of isolation, of being misunderstood, especially in this very high pressure, high risk, low trust, pressured, stressed, even borderline attacked experience in my life right now,” she said.
Dolezal resigned this week from her position as president of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), after multiple news outlets reported that she had been pretending to be black.
Watch the interview below:
