The NAACP leader who was recently outed as white says she identifies as black

The former president of an NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington has spoken out in an interview on the "Today" show to say that she identifies as black despite being a white woman.

Rachel Dolezal has been attempting to pass as a black woman for years. She has spoken out about racial issues and filed hate crime complaints, which police were not able to substantiate.

She told "Today" that she started identifying as black when she was 5 years old.

"I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon," Dolezal said. "... It was a little more complex than me identifying as black."

Last week, Dolezal's parents told news outlets that Dolezal is white. Local news in Washington started investigating her identity when authorities raised suspicions about her hate crime complaints. She resigned her position with the NAACP on Monday.

Dolezal said she was identified as black in newspapers when she was doing human rights work in north Idaho and she never corrected the record. She said that it's "more complex than being true or false in that particular instance."

When Lauer asked if Dolezal did anything to darken her complexion, she said: "I certainly don't stay out of the sun." She also said she has a "huge issue with blackface."

"This is not some freak, birth-of-a-nation, mockery blackface performance," Dolezal said. "This is on a very real, connected level, how I've actually had to go there with an experience."

She also said that she doesn't "put on blackface as a performance."

Here's a clip of the "Today" interview: