On Monday, Ms Dolezal resigned from the anti-racism organisation NAACP, after her parents said she was pretending to be black.
Speaking
to NBC, she said that from the age of five she "was drawing
self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon".
She added that she "takes exception" to suggestions she had deceived people.
"This
is not some freak-show, Birth of a Nation blackface performance," she
told NBC's Matt Lauer. "This is on a real connected level how I've had
to go there with the experience."
Hours beforehand, her mother
Rutheanne Dolezal told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme that her
daughter had become "disconnected from reality".
Ms Dolezal's
estranged parents say her origins are mostly white, with a small amount
of Native American ancestry. They say that she has no black origins.
They have produced childhood pictures of her daughter with pale skin, freckles and fair hair.
Discrimination case dismissed
US
media reported on Tuesday that in 2002 she sued the historically black
Howard University for discriminating against her for being white.
She subsequently claimed to be the victim of hate crimes for being black.
Ms Dolezal, then known as Rachel Moore, received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Howard University 13 years ago.
Court documents obtained by the Smoking Gun website show that she sued the university for "discrimination based on race, pregnancy, family responsibilities and gender".
As
part of her claim, she alleged that some of her artwork had been
removed from an exhibition in order to favour black students.
She said the art was removed from the 2001 exhibition because Howard
University was "motivated by a discriminatory purpose to favour
African-American students over".
The case was dismissed in 2004,
with no evidence found that Ms Dolezal had been discriminated against.
That decision was upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2005. She was ordered
to pay costs of $2,728.50 (£1,752) to Howard.
It is estimated that 93% of Howard University students are black, while only 1% are white. Its alumni include the writer Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison.
NAACP resignation
On Monday, Rachel Dolezal announced her resignation
as president of the The National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People's Spokane Chapter in Washington in the wake of the race
row.
An online petition calling for her to step down received hundred of signatures. She had already lost her job as a lecturer in African-American studies at a local university.
According to the Spokesman-Review newspaper,
Ms Dolezal said she was a mix of white, black and American Indian on
her application to serve on Spokane's citizen police ombudsman
commission in January.
The city's ethics committee said it was
investigating the allegations, in addition to a separate investigation
related to Ms Dolezal on a different matter.
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