text: Former Spokane, Washington NAACP chapter president Rachel Dolezal appears on NBC News on June 16, 2015. (Screenshot) 
   
   Former civic activist Rachel Dolezal went from claiming she is black to questioning whether she is actually part of a white family in an interview aired on Tuesday night with NBC News host Savannah Guthrie. 
   
   “I haven’t had a DNA test. There’s been no biological proof that Larry and Ruthanne are my biological parents,” said Dolezal, referring to the couple who exposed her last week, resulting in widespread criticism and her decision to step down as the head of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). 
   
   “There’s a birth certificate that has your name and their names on it,” Guthrie replied, over footage of the document. 
   
   “I’m not necessarily saying that I can prove they’re not,” Dolezal said. “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.” 
   
   A 2012 profile of Dolezal stated that she was “born in a teepee.” but her parents revealed last week that she is actually of Czech, Swedish and German descent. Dolezal has continued to argue that she is black. 
   
   “Nothing about being white describes who I am,” she said. “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.” 
   
   While she has “experimented” with her hair, she told Guthrie, she has not altered her skin. 
   
   “Some days I might spray on bronzer, if I want to get a glow,” Dolezal said. “Other days, I don’t.” 
   
   Watch footage from the interview, as posted online on Tuesday, below. ||||| She would not backpedal, and “I guarantee you she never will,” said her uncle, who took her in more than a decade ago as her marriage crumbled. “That’s part of her persona, never backing down — always forward, totally sure of herself.” 
   
   On Tuesday, Matt Lauer of NBC’s “Today” show asked her, “When did you start deceiving people?” But Ms. Dolezal, who stepped down on Monday as president of the Spokane N.A.A.C.P. chapter, pushed back. 
   
   “I do take exception to that because it’s a little more complex than me identifying as black, or answering a question of, ‘Are you black or white?’ ” she said. Over the course of the day, she also described herself as “transracial” and said: “Well, I definitely am not white. Nothing about being white describes who I am.” 
   
   Her story has set off a national debate about the very meaning of racial identity, with some people applauding her message and goals and others deploring her methods and actions. It was one thing for Ms. Dolezal to identify with, appreciate and even partake in black culture, some critics said, but it was another thing for her to try to become black, going so far as to change her physical appearance. 
   
   “It taps into all of these issues around blackface and wearing blackness and that whole cultural legacy, which makes it that much more vile,” said Baz Dreisinger, an English professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and author of the book “Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture.” 
   
   The term transracial has long been associated with adoptions of a child by a family of a different race. Angela Tucker, a black woman born in Tennessee and adopted by a white family in Bellingham, Wash., said it was “absolutely maddening” to associate the term with Ms. Dolezal’s story. 
   
   “It means a lot to those of us who call ourselves transracial adoptees,” said Ms. Tucker, 29, a social worker who lives in Seattle. “We have grown up in a culture different than what we physically represent. We’ve had to seek out our roots. What Rachel has done is misappropriate that.” 
   
   Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
   
   Some people who have known Ms. Dolezal only as a black woman said they felt hurt and misled. 
   
   “The issue for me has been the deception, the lie, portraying herself as someone she isn’t,” said Dorothy Webster, a longtime member of the Spokane N.A.A.C.P. and former deputy manager for the city of Spokane. “I cannot rationalize it.” 
   
   Clashing Versions of Past 
   
   Although her advocacy work has admirers, serious questions have been raised about Ms. Dolezal’s credibility — and not just about her race. Her public statements about her family and upbringing have been challenged by relatives, including her parents, creating the odd spectacle of dueling interviews, with her making claims on one network, and them denying them on another. Over the years she has reported numerous complaints with the police of racially motivated harassment and intimidation, though the police have said that none have so far proved credible enough for charges to be brought. 
   
   She is estranged from her parents, Ruthanne and Lawrence Dolezal, and in Spokane, she has represented a friend, an older African-American man, as her father. When Rachel Dolezal was a teenager, her parents adopted four black children, one of whom now lives with Ms. Dolezal and her son, whom she had with her former husband, Kevin D. Moore, who is black. 
   
   She is also estranged from her biological brother, Joshua, who is facing charges in Colorado that when he was 19 years old, he sexually molested one of his adopted brothers, who was 6 or 7 at the time, in their parents’ home, which was then in Clear Creek County, Colo. Ruthanne Dolezal told People magazine that the molestation charges are not true and were initiated by Rachel. 
   
   An Unorthodox Path 
   
   Ms. Dolezal’s path to this curious point has been unorthodox, beginning with her childhood in a remote corner of northwestern Montana, in and around the little town of Troy. Earlier this year, she told a news organization at Eastern Washington University, where she taught, that she had been born in a tepee, that her mother and stepfather had beaten her and her siblings, that “they would punish us by skin complexion,” and that they lived for a time in South Africa. 
   
   Family members say none of this is true. All agree that she has no stepfather, that this was one of several attempts she has made to deny the existence of her real father, Lawrence. Her parents moved to South Africa after Rachel was grown and out of the house. 
   
   Video 
   
   As for the abuse allegations, “that’s just false,” her father said in an interview on Friday. “That’s the most hurtful.” 
   
   There was a tepee, her uncle, Daniel said, but that was years before Rachel was born, in the early 1970s, when her parents were first married. “Larry and Ruthanne were kind of the quintessential Jesus people, hippies, back to nature, and they set up a tepee and lived in it for a year,” Daniel Dolezal said. “Drove my parents crazy, but nobody was born in the tepee.” 
   
   Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
   
   Ms. Dolezal said Tuesday on “Today” that at age 5, “I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon, and the black curly hair, you know.” Her parents, appearing later on Fox News, denied that. 
   
   Daniel Dolezal said Tuesday that her recollection of her 5-year-old self did not ring true. “She probably wouldn’t have known any black people” then, he said. (Efforts to reach Rachel Dolezal, Ruthanne and Lawrence Dolezal, and Joshua Dolezal on Tuesday were not successful.) 
   
   There is no hint of childhood racial tension in a memoir that her brother Joshua, an English professor at Central College in Iowa, wrote. The book, “Down From the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging,” describes a childhood blending religious fervor with a frontier lifestyle. 
   
   “My father reads from the book of Jeremiah,” he wrote. “The cover of his Bible is made of tanned elk hide that my mother sewed into the binding after cutting away the commercial hardback.” 
   
   Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. 
   
   Rachel was home-schooled for at least part of the time she was in high school, her uncle said. And when she was between the ages of 15 and 17, her parents adopted four black infants. 
   
   “She immediately was drawn to them,” her father said. “Ever since then she’s had a tremendous affinity with African-Americans.” 
   
   Ms. Dolezal said Tuesday that at the time, she thought of herself as white, but that began to change with the arrival of her new siblings, as she wondered, “Who is going to be the link for the kids in coming to the family?” 
   
   She learned of John M. Perkins, a Mississippi minister who preached racial reconciliation and social justice and, along with his son, Spencer, built what he called “intentional Christian communities,” including one called Antioch, in Jackson, Miss. Based largely on that connection, she chose to attend Belhaven College, a small Christian school in Jackson, and frequently visited Antioch, a home with about 25 other people near the Belhaven campus. 
   
   Black in a ‘White Body’ 
   
   “She adopted us as surrogate parents, and we adopted her as surrogate daughter,” said Ronald Potter, a brother-in-law of Spencer Perkins, who lived at Antioch and taught religion at Belhaven. Mr. Potter said, “We got very close with her.” 
   
   Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
   
   He described Ms. Dolezal as someone who was “extremely” socially conscious, much more so than the other students seemed to be. The first time he met her, he said, she reminded him of “a black girl in a white body,” like “hearing a black song by a white artist.” 
   
   But she was “snow white, white-white, lily white,” he said. “I had no idea that years later, she would match the body with the soul.” 
   
   Ms. Dolezal graduated from Belhaven in 2000 and that year married Mr. Moore. They moved to Washington, D.C., where she enrolled as a graduate student in art at Howard University, a historically black school. In 2002, she received a master’s degree in fine art, and days later, she gave birth to her son. 
   
   At Howard, as at Belhaven, her art focused on the black experience and racial reconciliation, but there was still no question about her own identity; in college and in graduate school, she was known as white. 
   
   In fact, Ms. Dolezal sued Howard, claiming that it had discriminated against her, in part for being white. She said she was denied financial help because the university’s attitude was, “You probably have white relatives that can afford to help you with your tuition,” she said on “Today.” Howard declined to comment on the case. 
   
   She and her husband, a physical therapist, moved to the tiny town of Bonners Ferry in far northern Idaho, not far from her parents. But in 2004, her uncle said, she left her husband, and moved in with him in Coeur d’Alene, living for several months in the basement. 
   
   She found various kinds of work, including selling her art, and teaching art, and she became involved in minority rights causes in Coeur d’Alene and nearby Spokane. Within a few years, family members said, they began to hear from others that Ms. Dolezal was identifying herself as something other than white. They said her background was European, except for a small fraction that is Native American. 
   
   In police reports around the region about complaints she made beginning in 2005, she is identified as white. By 2009, the reports call her a black woman. Former co-workers at the education institute and the N.A.A.C.P. said she told them she was partly black. 
   
   Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
   
   In 2008, she was hired as the education coordinator at the North Idaho Human Rights Education Institute and worked there until 2010. “Ms. Dolezal portrayed herself as African-American at that time,” the institute said in a statement on Tuesday. 
   
   “She was extremely gifted and produced very, very powerful exhibits for the institute” recalled Tony Stewart, a retired North Idaho College professor and longtime civil rights activist. He said he and others who met Dolezal in 2008 were left with the clear impression she was black. 
   
   “Yes, we did think she was a person of color,” Mr. Stewart said Tuesday. 
   
   She taught courses at North Idaho College, and later also at Eastern Washington University, where she worked in the Africana studies program. She became an adviser to black student groups. 
   
   About five years ago, she also took guardianship of one of her adoptive siblings, Izaiah, who was then a teenager. “She decided that he was being abused, so she basically showed up and took him, and essentially said if you want him back, you’re going to have to sue,” her uncle said. 
   
   But questions about Ms. Dolezal, if not suspicion that she was not exactly everything she purported to be, were never far away either. In her neighborhood of mostly modest homes south of downtown, one neighbor, Tony Berg, a hydraulics technician who was sitting on his front step with a cigarette on a recent morning across the street from her house, said he saw Ms. Dolezal’s appearance change and at first thought someone else had moved in. 
   
   “She was blond — dreadlocks down to here and white skin,” Mr. Berg said, drawing a line across his waist. “Then a year or two later, I began seeing a darker-skinned woman go into the house. She had changed.” 
   
   Growing Suspicions 
   
   And some of the questions, or doubts, about her racial identity were also being deliberately spread. A columnist at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Shawn Vestal, said that he and other people at the paper were approached by a private investigator in early June, more than a week before the first news reports about Ms. Dolezal’s racial identity. 
   
   “He did have some of the evidence, or said he did, about what her parents would say about her identity,” said Mr. Vestal, who said he had agreed with the investigator that his name would not be made public. 
   
   In the “Today” interview on Tuesday and one that followed on a sister network, MSNBC, Ms. Dolezal, remarkably composed despite harsh criticism aimed at her, stuck to her insistence that racial heredity does not equal identity, and she would not answer questions about whether she had changed her self-identification to merely gain advantage. Mr. Lauer asked if she could have been as successful an activist if she had portrayed herself as white. 
   
   Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
   
   “I don’t know,” Ms. Dolezal said. “I guess I haven’t had the opportunity to experience that in those shoes, so I’m not sure.”
target: – The Rachel Dolezal story got even stranger during an NBC interview last night in which, as Raw Story puts it, she went "full-scale birther" on herself. Asked by Savannah Guthrie whether she thought it was misleading to identify as black, Dolezal responded, "I haven't had a DNA test. There's been no biological proof that Larry and Ruthanne [Dolezal] are my biological parents." When reminded that her name and their names are on her birth certificate, Dolezal said she couldn't prove they're not her parents, 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." "I definitely am not white," Dolezal continued. "Nothing about being white describes who I am. The closest thing that I can come to is if—if you're black or white, I'm black. I'm more black than I am white." Dolezal said she hasn't changed her skin color, but she does spray on bronzer some days. It isn't clear whether there were any "medical witnesses" to her birth, or whether she really believes her parents may not be her parents. Dolezal has claimed to have been born in a tepee, but her uncle tells the New York Times that isn't true. "Larry and Ruthanne were kind of the quintessential Jesus people, hippies, back to nature, and they set up a tepee and lived in it for a year," he says. "Drove my parents crazy, but nobody was born in the tepee."