Dolezal: 'No Biological Proof' White Parents Birthed Me

'Yeah, I am black,' she tells NBC
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 17, 2015 3:26 AM CDT
Updated Jun 17, 2015 6:00 AM CDT
Dolezal: 'No Biological Proof' White Parents Birthed Me
Former NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal appears on the "Today" show during an interview with co-host Matt Lauer yesterday.   (Anthony Quintano/NBC News via AP)

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." (More Rachel Dolezal stories.)

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